The Artifact (28 page)

Callaghan frowned at Andrea’s question. “I realize you have gone through a great deal for this, but I am not yet prepared for full disclosure to the press.”

Andrea’s voice was a hoarse whisper, the sibilants sounding like run-on words. “You want Sam to fly me out of here with a half-baked story about some ancient Jewish rebellion?”

Callaghan acknowledged her point. “I can’t deny that, Ms. Madigan. I’ll have to consult Hannah,” he turned to the woman’s twin and reached for her hand. “Sorry. Consult Cassandra and the others.”

She thought that was baloney. This man was the quintessential military commander, intrepid, focused on his objective, unused to ceding or sharing decisions with anyone. Andy took another, less sensitive tack. “Start with Camp Champion in Kuwait, where you stopped me from boarding the C-130. Did you accompany Lieutenant Mitchell’s Platoon instead of landing in Haditha with ‘B’ Company HQ?”

Cassandra’s voice was soft, but insistent. “Tell her, Clyde. Perhaps she can help us.”

Callaghan drew a deep breath and exhaled it with a shake of his head. “I didn’t go with Mitchell, not then.”

The C-130 transports had fanned out across northern Iraq, dropping five platoons of Bravo Company at various points in the desert from which they would scour the area between Baghdad, Saddam’s tribal village of Tikrit and the Jordanian border. Mitchell’s Second platoon, landed south of Al Qaem, where the lieutenant organized twelve to fifteen trooper squads that he sent out in Humvees and Chinooks to the east and west of their position.

Mitchell went west with his third squad in a couple of Hummers and weapons carrier along a primitive road toward Akashat, stopping occasional groups of travelers on foot, dromedaries, decrepit sand-blasted motorized conveyances, searching villages and towns along the way. The map showed a couple of tiny villages off the track to the west and several more to the east. Mitchell split the squad in two, sending seven troopers west with the squad leader and took nine soldiers east: Alvarez, Gerlach, Ogilvie, Palagi, Conté, Franks, their medic Ogilvie, and Bogosian among them.

On their third day out, Mitchell’s fire team stopped at an oasis where they encountered a vicious sand storm. The ground was firmer there, so they dug in under and between their vehicles for the entire day and night that followed. When the sirocco abated, Mitchell saw that it had obliterated the scant definition of the road, so he was forced to proceed with compass, GPS, and map. Since he couldn’t tell exactly where the road was, he sent soldiers out ahead to scout from atop dunes to the left and right of his little convoy. The Iraqis had been planting personnel mines indiscriminately along various routes from town to town, first against the Kurds, then in ’91 during Desert Storm, even though the Gulf War was fought mainly down in Kuwait. And mines dropped by American planes. One of the scouts triggered a cluster bomb, and Hannah ran out to him with her triage kit. The nomads must have heard the explosion, because the following morning about fifty tribesmen came charging over a steep incline on horseback and camels directly out of the rising sun, yelling and screaming their lungs out.

“They began shooting,” Callaghan continued, “as they rushed down the slope, gesticulating wildly and circling the convoy like a bunch of bloodthirsty savages in burnoose, billowing robes, right out of Lawrence of Arabia.

“Our guys were already in position in the vehicles behind their machine guns, but the Bedouins were moving so fast and close, it took us a while to scatter them. Mitchell ran up to drag the casualties back, and that’s when he lost it. The nomads got organized for a second sally, so the rest of the squad was pretty busy until they drove them off for good. When they examined the mine crater more carefully they found the amphora.”

Andrea grimaced. “And your dress green send-off to the Second Platoon boarding their transport home was actually deference for him?”

“Wilson and the document were being loaded at the same time as the platoon embarked on the aircraft,” Geoff told her.

“Mitchell was ranting about God, the Bedouins and document, so I sent him home immediately with another battalion under tight security,” Callaghan said. “Sergeant Conté pretended PTSD as the result of supposedly failing to prevent Mitchell’s body from being carried off by the Nomads. The lieutenant was classified MIA to confuse any subsequent inquiries. Fortunately, he was unmarried with no close relatives. You know the rest.”

Paula Najarian had sent the locked metal briefcase to WFO handcuffed to the wrist of one of three armed couriers within an hour of apprehending Eddie DiBiasio and his Providence henchmen, whom she had moved from the cramped, four-cell jail in Machias to the Federal Penitentiary in

Saranac, New York. The sole result of their arrest for armed theft, arson, murder and ‘round the clock interrogation was their adoption of
omerta
, the inviolate code of self-imposed silence of organized crime.

Their lawyers had arrived from Providence within six hours following Eddie’s cryptic phone call to his Uncle Vinnie, from which point Paula and the U.S. Attorney from Plattsburgh had to deal not only with the recalcitrant Mafiosi, but their obstreperous legal counsel bent on setting their clients free on bail.

Deputy Director Tom Harrington called her out of an interrogation session with DiBiasio the following afternoon. “You screwed up,” he told her. “The Director wants you off the case.”

She could hear his barely controlled anger over the encrypted phone line as he related the outcome of the linguistics experts who had analyzed the original artifact document and its translation into English: both were the carefully rendered ancient manuscript unearthed by an Arab peasant in Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt in 1945 known as the Gnostic Gospels.

“How the hell was I supposed to determine that from the field?” she demanded.

“What have you learned from the Mafia thugs?”

“Zilch. Young guy named DiBiasio claims the Iraqi’s car-bombed the farmhouse with Callaghan and his people in it before they got there.”

“They offed the Arabs and took what Callaghan had evidently convinced them was the real thing?”

“Sounds like it. Forensics dug four bodies out of the rubble, no I.D.’s yet. Two Arabs, probably Iraqis, dead in the woods. One shot, the other with a big smile under his chin.”

She began to protest further, but slammed the receiver down when she heard the dial tone. Paula Najarian was unused to failure. If she obeyed Harrington’s orders and returned to Washington, her 23-year agency career was in the toilet. If she ignored this mandate she could be brought up on charges and on the street, probably without her pension. Unless she found the real document and took Callaghan alive. Killing him would leave her without a hand to play. By holding him hostage, threatening to let the press interview him, she could negotiate a deal with Harrington.

She opened the door to the small conference room smiling. Eddie was still seated at the head of the narrow metal table wearing the orange prison coveralls on which Paula had insisted, his smarmy lawyers to his left, Don Jackson, the U.S Attorney opposite.

She explained her good humor as the result of the phone call from Washington that authorized her to offer a substantial reduction of charges in exchange for Eddie’s total cooperation in relating the events that had taken place in the Machias farmhouse. There would be no need to divulge any information regarding his associates or connection to organized crime.

She stood in the cold damp air by her rental car in the parking lot outside the foreboding stone wall topped with razor wire. Eddie claimed that the helicopter was still in the field near the barn when they had arrived at the blazing farmhouse. Since it was gone when she had reached the scene a half hour later, Callaghan and perps were alive and in possession of the real document at some new hideaway. But where? She pressed the instant dial key of her cell phone that rang up Jerry Roland.

“I just got the word,” he said. “Shit happens, pal.”

“Not yet, it hasn’t. I’m betting that Callaghan and friends did not die in the firebomb the Arabs or DiBiasio planted, but somehow took off with Madigan in the helicopter before the house blew.”

“Paula, you’re not going to....”

“I’m going to catch that bastard, Jer. Question is, what are you going to do?”

Paula determined that the average range of the helicopter described by Eddie DiBiasio was roughly five hundred miles. She would begin calling local police on the outer perimeter of a circle describing that distance from Machias; Jerry would call those closest to town. With any luck, someone would report sighting an unauthorized chopper flying or sitting in an open field before Travis came out and took charge. As usual, municipal cops were usually not forthcoming with requests from Washington agencies due to provincial egos and traditional antipathy toward any federal investigation of incidents or suspects in their hallowed domain, so progress was slow.

Jerry started his inquiries in Machias with the realtor and airfield manager from whom he gathered a verbal portrait of the five renegade soldiers, Samuel Simkowski and the AmerAsian woman. If they were flying any distance, they would need to refuel nearby. If not, they would have to land somewhere within a five hundred or so mile radius of Machias.

Paula was bone weary when they checked into the Augusta motel. Jerry began to stroke her ego and usually responsive physical properties soon after he placed the chain on the door of the room, but she slapped his hand away with a series of expletives that must have burned the ears of adjacent occupants.

Jerry used his laptop to make a list all aircraft fueling facilities in the area, but canvassing every private airfield by phone for an unknown helicopter was time consuming and eventually unproductive. Paula wanted a helicopter on standby when they located Callaghan, and found a charter aircraft service at Augusta International Airport, but it was closed by the time she called it. Damn! She should have reserved that first. Working on her own like some paperback P.I. was a new experience, and frustrating. If she had the resources of the entire federal justice system at her disposal her quest would be infinitely more easy and, she was convinced, enable her to apprehended Callaghan quickly. Harrington and Travis were enjoying that luxury, but they didn’t have the background leads she had. Her best advantage, she believed, was her possession of Madigan’s cell phone number acquired during the unauthorized tap she had placed on the reporter’s home phone. Harrington might not have that, and could be so focused on finding Callaghan, that Andrea’s presence among the artifact thieves may have escaped him. She could hire a private GPS search firm to locate the phone, but that could get back to the Bureau. Her best bet was to get one of the advanced Beta cell phones issued to the Bureau by the developer, Loopt, that could pinpoint the location of any cell phone via Global Positioning Satellite. Maybe Maria, Harrington’s aggressive woman’s lib secretary could send her one. Then all she would have to do was wait for Andrea to turn her phone on.

The occupants of the isolated hunting lodge had reconvened in the spacious kitchen for a dinner of roast turkey and vegetables prepared by Sammy and Geoff. The five non-coms had eaten earlier, were back at their task assembling the random segments submitted to experts for translation into the finished translated pages in their proper sequence; the remaining ex-troopers patrolled the lodge perimeter. Andrea looked at Cassandra seated beside her at the long table covered with a colorful patterned cloth and depleted dishes of hearty country food. She was still uneasy at the woman’s mirror image of the assassinated Preacher and determined to learn how the twins fit into Callaghan’s artifact scheme. “Do you feel up to answering a couple of questions about your sister?”

Callaghan shot her a look of amused disgust. “You people would try to interview Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse if you could find it.”

Cassandra had seemed upset at his sparse narrative earlier that afternoon, yet now appeared resigned to disclosing some portion of her sister’s role in the artifact phenomenon. “It’s all right, Clyde. I guess there’s a clock running for all of us.”