The Brotherhood Conspiracy (39 page)

He looked along the line of stone ramparts to the north. In the distance was the Tower of the King’s Daughter and the tourist-filled restaurant that beckoned to Bohannon’s growling stomach.

His mind wandered over the past and present as he walked along the empty castle rampart, the parapet wall to his right. The Buqai’ah Valley stretched out far below. The late afternoon sunshine filtered through distant billows of dust and sand. What to do next? Exhaustion hung on his bones. He was more than tired. He was worn out and discouraged to his core. The adrenaline accompanying the president’s plea, the excitement of the chase he’d felt on the flight to Tripoli, the miracle of a second brass mezuzah—all were now displaced by a feeling that he was merely a captive of his own foolish, self-serving pride.

Really . . . why am I here in the middle of the Syrian desert? I’m just a normal guy. What am I doing?

Across the valley to the east, the Alawite Mountains radiated a golden glow. From this height—more than two thousand feet above the valley floor—he could see forever across the flat desert plain. Bohannon was lost in his thoughts, in his doubts.

“I sincerely hope your considerable efforts have been rewarded.”

Startled, Bohannon stumbled against the parapet wall.

Standing behind him, a short way back along the rampart, was the student from the gate.

“Forgive me for interrupting you,” said Zaka Alaoui, that painted-on smile failing to bring any softness to his hardened features. “I noticed you walking along the wall. I only wanted to ask if your visit was satisfactory. Perhaps there is something I could help you with after all?”

His demeanor was deferential, but his eyes betrayed a man of many motives. Bohannon didn’t like this guy, or the vibes he was generating. He eased away.
Simply speaking to this smarmy young man soiled his soul. “I found what I came to see.”

“Ah . . . so the curator of the library helped you find . . . what was it you said you sought?”

“I didn’t say. Look . . . I’ve got to go. I need to get something to eat before I can think about getting back on that bus.”

Alaoui moved closer, forcing Bohannon’s back against the wall. “Did he show you something?” Now the smile was gone. “A scroll, perhaps? A book? A mezuzah etched with symbols?”

Pushing out his left arm to move the young man out of his way, Bohannon stepped to his right, along the parapet wall, making for the sanctuary of the restaurant in the Tower of the King’s Daughter. Before he could take two steps, the young man clamped his right hand on Bohannon’s left wrist and twisted, pulling Bohannon’s arm back and pushing his wrist up, just under Tom’s shoulder blades. Tom now felt the power of the muscles he’d noticed earlier. And pain, as the young man nearly lifted him off his feet, pressing his wrist higher while pushing him face-first toward the wall.

Bohannon drove the pain from his mind for a moment, and filled his lungs with enough air to launch a call for help. But Alaoui’s left hand came up and wrapped itself around Bohannon’s throat, pressing down on his windpipe.

Alaoui had short, powerful arms that drove the bigger man forward. Tom’s stomach slammed into stone, knocking out of him whatever air was left. Legs scrambling for purchase, choking from lack of oxygen, his left shoulder straining against its socket, he was clearly conscious of only one thing. The man’s strong arms were lifting him, inch-by-inch, onto the top of the parapet wall.

The higher he was pushed, the more Tom could see the sheer drop from the castle’s wall, and the cliffs below it, tumbling into the valley. His head was spinning—whether from lack of oxygen or vertigo it didn’t really matter. The fear that drove the flailing of his arms and legs rapidly turned to panic. He scraped his knees against the parapet, his free right hand grasping at the air, looking for . . . anything. Bohannon’s waist was now above the top of the wall.

“What did he show you?” Alaoui hissed. “What did he tell you? What did he give you?”

The thought came suddenly, through the blackening fog.
He can’t get me over. His arms are too short.
Bohannon closed his eyes. He fought desperately now to visualize his position in relation to the body of the man behind him.

With all his remaining strength he grabbed the outside edge of the parapet wall with his right hand and pushed his body out, over the parapet even further. As he did, Alaoui lost his grip on Bohannon’s throat and a fresh intake of air cleared his mind. As the pressure on his left arm eased, Bohannon used the leverage of the wall as a fulcrum, and kicked both of his legs like the pistons on a huge, diesel engine, driving his boots into Alaoui’s chest, throwing him backward with a violent thrust.

Bohannon heard scrambling behind him and a short yelp, but his concentration was now solely focused on regaining his balance. Propelled forward by his desperate kick against Alaoui’s chest, Tom’s head, chest, and hips now tipped over the two-thousand-foot drop into the valley below. He could feel in his stomach and see in his mind his body plummeting to its death in the Syrian desert.

He dug his thighs into the top edge of the parapet wall, ignored the stabbing pain in his left shoulder, and grabbed the top of the wall with all the strength left in his arms and hands. His left palm pressed against the inside corner of the parapet, worn smooth through the ages. He tried to hook his legs, his feet, against the inside edge of the wall, his right hand scraping against the face of the fortress, frantic for some traction.

A seam . . . his right hand found a seam between two of the stacked stones, an edge against which he could wedge his hand. He shoved his fingers and part of his palm into the gap between the stones—but the shift in his weight tipped the scales. Bohannon’s body began to roll into space.

His heart jumped . . . his entire body tensed . . . his shoulder dipped into the void. He was going over. “Oh . . . God . . .” He could see Annie’s face. “Ohh . . .”

Bohannon screamed—whether from fear or hope, he would never know—as two strong hands grasped his ankles. With the weight pushing down on his legs, Bohannon’s body lifted out of the abyss. He pushed his hand against the seam in the stones, felt his shoulders rise above the parapet, the balance of his weight shifting to the inside of the wall. Then he thought of the young man, Alaoui, and he tensed once more, ready to fight for his life again. But . . . why?

“Are you safe?”

It was the dry, scraping voice of the curator.

Bohannon’s body slipped over the corner of the parapet wall, again abrading his thighs against the unforgiving stone. As his feet hit the rampart, his knees buckled, and his stomach began vomiting out his fear. Bohannon collapsed onto the stone walkway. His eyes closed, his heart racing, the bile in his stomach
burning his throat, sobs of relief fought with the impulse to retch, rocking his shoulders, as tears slipped down his cheeks.

“Why was that young man following you?” whispered the curator. “With such hatred in his face? A thief perhaps? An assassin?”

He put his hand on Bohannon’s shoulder.

“I watched, and then followed. I was below when he attacked. Perhaps his hatred was its own executioner? Come . . . you must leave. Do you want to be held for questioning by the police, I don’t think?”

Bohannon’s body was lathered in a full sweat. He felt like he was ready to pass out. He didn’t have the strength to lift his head, let alone move. With knuckles, knees, and thighs all scraped and bleeding, Tom tried to lift his body. The curator crouched by his side.

Three feet away, the rampart’s inner edge gave way to a thirty-foot drop into an upper square of the castle. A thick, rough, sisal hemp rope was strung along the inner edge of the rampart, passing through iron stanchions at regular intervals. It was a warning.

Two ragged-edged pieces of white linen cloth hung limply from the coarse surface of the rope. There were two scrape marks leading over the edge of the stone rampart, just below the torn pieces of kaftan snared by the yellow rope.

Jerusalem

Joe Rordiguez left the Old City by the New Gate and turned toward the honking chaos and exhaust poison of Suleiman Road, which skirts the city on the northeast. As he passed the
C
-shaped stairs down to the Damascus Gate, a tour bus squeezed by on his left, skirting the earthquake damage that still pockmarked the road. A seemingly endless human tide streamed through the Damascus Gate and were greeted by the competing shouts of street hawkers who lined both sides of the stairs.

A hundred yards down the hill he came upon the doorway to Solomon’s Quarries, a huge cave at least two football fields long that sloped to the south, toward the Temple Mount. Discovered in 1852 and considered to be the source for the stone used to build the temple area, little is known about the cavern except that several huge, half-hewn blocks of limestone litter the floor and the walls show clear evidence of quarrying. But Rodriguez wasn’t interested in the quarry.

Across Suleiman Road, at the end of a short alley and cut out of the rock, he could see the dark indentation of an entrance that ran under the far hill, a cavern known as Jeremiah’s Grotto—the place where Jeremiah was imprisoned by King Zedekiah and where, according to legend, the prophet wrote the book of Lamentations.

From the shadowed doorway to Solomon’s Quarries Rodriguez appeared to be scanning a Jerusalem tourist guide. In spite of the long bus ride from Tripoli, that drained the energy from his body, Joe kept close watch on the gate at the far end of the alley. The sun was hard to the west, casting long shadows across the street, but heat still pounded off the asphalt, sucking the moisture out of his skin and driving most tourists to the air-conditioned indoors. Pedestrians were primarily locals, most in kaftans of many colors, who threaded their way through crates of fruits and vegetables. Joe considered each one a suspicious threat. No one approached the grotto.

Joe’s self-preservation clicked in enough that he looked up and down the street for a careening vehicle. There was no wheeled threat, so he crossed Suleiman Road and entered into the cool darkness of the grotto’s entrance.

To the left of the entrance, protected from the sun in deep shadow, a man—his yarmulke-covered head resting on his arms atop a battered wooden desk—slept loudly, his snores echoing down the cavern.

Joe stopped for a moment and debated. It wasn’t a question of ducking the ten-shekel admission. He felt his investigation might go more smoothly—alone. Eyes adjusting to the dim light, Joe felt like a kid stealing candy as he skulked deeper into the grotto.

The space was larger than it appeared from the outside. It was a wide, square cavern with a high ceiling and several ancient, wooden doors exiting to the north of the main cave. The air was stale, heavy, and smelled of chalk dust. Joe pulled a compact flashlight from his pocket and swept its intense beam across the wall surfaces. Scrubbed graffiti, vandalism from across the ages, scarred much of the grotto’s surface. But the north wall, with the doors, was cordoned off by a low stone wall above which hung a thick rope tied to metal rings secured to the sidewalls.

Joe sat on the low wall, swung his long legs to the other side, slipped under the rope, stood to his feet, and began to study the north wall.

“We are trying to keep the north wall clean . . . no graffiti.”

Joe’s heart pounded at the sound of the voice behind him. But the voice held
no enmity, only invitation. “This sorry excuse for a barrier is there to protect it from . . . oy . . . I told them it would not work.”

He turned to find the man who had been sleeping behind the desk, a smile waiting for him.

“Is there something I can help you with?” the man inquired. “Perhaps I can show you some of the rare carvings on the wall that has caught your interest? Oy . . . I sound like I’m still selling leather jackets on Orchard Street.”

Rodriguez started. “The Lower East Side?”

The man’s eyes lit up the dim cavern. “Ahhh . . . and you?”

“Washington Heights.”

“Well, then, Washington Heights, what can I show you?”

Joe relaxed. He had found an ally. “Was this really—”

“Just a moment,” said the man, holding out his hand. “Ten shekels, then we begin your education.”

“Okay,” said Rodriguez, dropping a handful of coins into the man’s right palm. “How do you know for sure that this is—”

The man’s left hand came up, palm out. “Patience, my New York friend. Patience. For ten shekels, I throw in my sales pitch, for free. It’s a bargain.” He pointed. “Sit.”

Rodriguez was now a prisoner of someone else’s timetable. He sat again on the low wall and stretched his long legs.

“Thank you,” the man said, reaching forward for Joe’s hand. “Ronald Fineman, formerly of Queens, New York City, retired owner of Leather World on Orchard Street.” Ronald Fineman’s thinning hair was swept straight back from a prominent brow. His head nodded punctuation to every word he spoke and the goatee on the end of his chin bobbed like a teacher’s pointer. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Sorry, no. I’m Joseph Rodriguez, raised in the Bronx and now living in Washington Heights. Curator of the Periodicals Room at the Humanities and Social Science Library on Bryant Park. It’s a pleasure.”

“Ah . . . the one with the lions,” Fineman said of the iconic pair of crouching lions that flanked the main entrance to the ornate, Beaux-Arts Library on Fifth Avenue. “A beautiful building. I’ve been there to see the Gutenberg Bible. And the Jewish division”—Fineman’s dark eyes sparked with an inner joy and flanked a thin, pointy nose—“that is right next to the Periodicals Room . . . the one with all the beautiful murals of the old newspaper buildings in Manhattan, correct?”