The Brotherhood Conspiracy (45 page)

Joe Rodriguez peeled himself from the cracked leather back seat of the Land Rover. The thermal blanket he had gathered up from the garage in Jerusalem kept him warm. But it did nothing to relieve the consequences of the contortions he’d gotten into during the interminable night of fitful sleep. Stretching, his neck creaked.

Outside the Land Rover, light was beginning to play along the tops of the earth-brown, sandstone buttes, carved into undulating curves, sanded smooth by the incessant sirocco winds off the desert. But down in the narrow defile, tucked under an outcropping of stone, darkness still surrounded Rodriguez and his battered ride. Fortunate to have found this hiding place in the fast fading light of a desert evening, Joe was relieved to be off the road and out of sight. It gave him a semblance of security. But not enough to bless him with real sleep. Which may have eluded him anyway.

What to do now?

He was here, in the upper reaches of the Ascent of Akkrabim, the snakelike slither of Scorpion Pass falling away into the Dead Sea valley far below. He had come this far. What was next? Rodriguez pulled out one of the two things he prayed would give him hope.

Joe pushed open the rear door of the Land Rover, activating the dome light. On his lap he spread out the document that Fineman created before Joe left
Jeremiah’s Grotto. Fineman kept up a running explanation as he scribbled, calculated, and measured over the face of a long, unrolled length of poster paper.

“You could spend the rest of your life searching the hundreds of caves that perforate Scorpion Pass,” Fineman instructed Joe. “And you could lose your life in any one of them. The sandstone of the Akkrabim escarpment has been pounded by violent torrents of exploding thunderstorms and eroded by centuries of desert wind. The erosion has occurred outside, on the cliff faces, but also inside, in the labyrinthine corridors that weave through the depths of the canyon walls. Not only is it easy to get lost—fatally lost—” Fineman shot a look over his shoulder, “but it’s also easy to get drowned.”

“Fatally drowned?”

“Yes, mister wise guy Washington Heights, fatally drowned.”

Fineman went back to his work. Joe could see it was another rough map of the land south of Jerusalem—Dead Sea to the east, the Mediterranean to the west.

“Imagine being deep in the sloping switchbacks of these caves when a sudden storm erupts above the pass, unleashing a torrential flood that those cliffs can’t possibly absorb. What happens then? Where does all that water go?”

“The Bronx?”

Fineman reached for a long, straight, flat piece of wood he had pulled out of his office. He placed it on the poster paper and drew a long, straight line on the left side of the paper, a ragged curve of coastline farther to the left. Then he measured three marks, and drew another long line to the east. Fineman stood up and looked down at his handiwork. “Wise guy,” he muttered. “I should just let you go out there in the desert and wander around until your fingernails grow as long as your arm.”

“Okay . . . okay, I need your help,” said Joe, noting the twinkle in the old man’s eyes. “Are you going to tell me what your finger painting is all about?”

With a sweep of his hand, Fineman stepped back from the table. “It’s about where you should look. What else would it be? Here, look . . . I can get you this close.”

Joe looked down at the paper on his lap and tried not to forget any of the rabbi’s instructions. He pulled a compass from his jacket pocket, opened it, and
placed it on the paper, resting on his knee. Then he traced the lines Fineman had drawn across the face of the paper.

“You must remember the time in which Abiathar lived,” Fineman told him back in the grotto. Then he moved his hand along the left side of his page. “The Crusaders controlled the coastline, the major cities along the coast, and all the coastal flatlands that ran up into the hills of Palestine. To get to Scorpion Pass, Abiathar would not normally have traveled in that direction. But it’s good that we can now rule it out entirely. If, in fact, he was moving the Ark of the Covenant, and the Tent of Meeting, he would have avoided the Crusaders like the plague. So, he didn’t go by the coast—or anywhere near the coast.”

Fineman then pointed at three dots on the right side of the design, through which another of the straight lines was drawn.

“But, he could not have moved through the desert, either. See these dots? There was a line of Muslim fortresses in the desert guarding the trade route between Egypt and Damascus. While the powerless Fatimids controlled Jerusalem and presented little real opposition to the Crusader invasion, a massive Arab army was raised in the east, hundreds of thousands of soldiers under the command of the great general, Sal-ad-Din. Despite its size, the Arab army was not strong enough to challenge the armored knights and powerful war horses of the Crusaders. But they were powerful enough to garrison a string of fortresses, protect the vital land routes, and provide a formidable deterrent to any further European expansion. Sal-ad-Din, who was a brilliant tactician, decided to wait, watch, and outlast these infidel invaders.”

Joe put a hand on Fineman’s shoulder, drawing the old man’s attention from what was now clearly a map on the table. “You seem to know an awful lot about this.”

“Rabbi school,” said Fineman, whose face took on an offended scowl. “And I was a history geek in school. You think you have a corner on the curiosity market?”

Without waiting for a reply, Fineman turned back to the map.

“So, Abiathar could not go along the coast and he could not venture into the desert and try to go by the caravan routes.” Fineman traced the path of the two long lines as they traveled south. “From Jerusalem,” Fineman said, “these are the boundaries of Abiathar’s safe travel. On the east”—he pointed at an elongated oval—“the Dead Sea. Can’t go that way, either.” Then his finger traced an imaginary line, from north to south, to the east of the Dead Sea. “And this
is the great Dead Sea defile, over one hundred miles of cliffs and canyons . . . roadless waste. Abiathar was not going to transport heavily laden wagonloads over this kind of terrain.”

Fineman pointed to a thick, curving line and waited for Rodriguez.

“So Abiathar had to come into Scorpion Pass from the west, from the heights,” Rodriguez offered. “That’s the only route left open to him. And that helps how? No, wait . . . I know . . . if he’s pushing and pulling six wagons loaded down with the Tent, if he’s carrying the Ark, he does not want to go down Scorpion Pass. He’s going to be looking for a place to hide not long after he gets into the pass.”

“Exactly,” said the rabbi, his chin whiskers bobbing up and down in agreement. “Which brings us to the second thing that will help you in your search.”

Fineman picked up a piece of carbon from the table and, placing it on its edge, traced a wide, light gray path along the line of Scorpion Pass. The pastel path of the carbon started down along the original line from the north, then soon diverted away from the line of the pass and wove a separate course to the desert floor below. Then he turned to Rodriguez.

“Israel’s history is filled with many things, my friend. One of them is earthquakes.”

Joe flinched at the memory.

“Yes . . . you know about the earthquakes here.” Fineman turned back to the map and his pastel path. “Along here is the Dead Sea Fault, about a seven hundred mile long fault line that is the deepest known break in the earth’s crust. It is part of the Great Rift Valley that runs for three thousand miles between Syria and Mozambique. Up here, from Haifa to the Jordan River, runs another active fault. In this area, earthquakes are very common. The big ones hit about every four hundred years.”

“Like ours?”

“Your earthquake?” Fineman’s voice held the incredulous tone of one startled by effrontery. “Your earthquake was a burp. In 1546, Jerusalem was hit with the third strongest earthquake in its history, a quake that destroyed the Dome of the Rock and pulverized the soaring dome on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A quake that mangled the earth up and down the Dead Sea Fault.”

This time Joe didn’t know where this conversation was leading.

Fineman tapped the swath of carbon on his map. “That earthquake was so strong it moved the cleft that is the Ascent of Akkrabim.”

Joe looked at the map in his lap. Fineman’s history lesson had made his quest fairly simple. More than two thirds of the Ascent of Akkrabim that wound its way below him would have been inaccessible to Abiathar one thousand years ago. It didn’t exist.

If Joe had any hope of locating the hiding place of the Tent of Meeting, it was in this relatively short stretch from its Roman crest to a spot Fineman calculated, a few hundred yards below his current location. His search was narrowed considerably.

Then there was the toy Sam Reynolds provided.

Ma’ale Adumim, West Bank

Nearly half an hour remained before the imams would sing the invitation to prayer from the hundreds of minarets sprouting from the sun-bleached buildings of the West Bank. Black shadows were deep on the silent streets. Three of them moved with the stealth of those whose purpose is lethal.

The shadows were long-limbed and dressed in tight-fitting, black assault uniforms and hoods. Only their eyes were uncovered. They moved with swift, silent precision, executing an alternating dance across each open space, disappearing into the next refuge of black shadow.

At the corner of an empty market square they paused for a moment, then ducked inside an open archway and stopped in the shadow beside an open courtyard. The shortest of the three pointed to a building on the right flank of the courtyard and the three moved with haste to a closed door. The short one forced the lock and they vanished into the building.

Sayeed al-Sadr—the man most of the world knew as Abu Gherazim, foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority—sat beside a small, round table, his neglected coffee long grown cold, and pondered his future. However short.

The Jordanian king risked his own safety by inviting Abu Gherazim to speak in Amman. The speech was well received by some, but an hour later an avalanche of abuse and incessant threats poured forth from the Muslim community with the force of a savage thunderstorm.

It was a risk, calling for a reformation of Islam, a repudiation of the doctrine
of jihad and martyrdom. But it was time. Someone needed to take the risk, to speak the truth first. Abu Gherazim did not regret his words. He only wondered how many chances he would have to repeat them, how long he would retain his position as foreign minister. Dissent was not encouraged within the Muslim community. Heresy was a capital offense.

He glanced across the rooftops of what he hoped, someday, would be part of a true Palestinian homeland. As the sky turned from black to gray, he wondered if there would be enough time.