The Prophet Conspiracy (12 page)

In the darkness, Siobhan crawled on her hands and knees, favoring the left one. She followed the trail of boards deeper and deeper into the blackness, hoping somewhere there was another entrance. Every so often, her fingers brushed up against stones or pottery shards. Once she touched what she knew to be a plastic bucket.

Then she felt the dry, curved shape of a rib bone. Probably an animal’s.

“Oh please, God, let it be an animal’s,” she whispered.

“What?” was the whispered reply from behind her.

“Nothing,” she said and kept crawling. She had been on digs as a student — most often to Native American sites back home. She had also been on that first dig in Jerusalem. In both cases, though, there had been a network of work lamps strung from the ceiling. She imagined there was here, too, but it was off, and Cameron was absolutely opposed to turning on any lights.

Distant shouting in Hebrew gave the obvious reason. The Shin Bet was here. Either turning on her phone had drawn them or else the workers on Kendrick’s dig had called in an alarm after the gunshots. Either way, barely-heard purposeful shouting and clamoring reached them from above.

He had given her one single mission: find them a place to hide before Shin Bet agents came down the hole and into the tunnel.

She had no idea how to fulfill that mission. So far, there had been no break in the narrow walls.

Her left hand slipped into nothingness.

Siobhan clamped her jaw shut around a scream as she almost pitched forward onto her face. The sudden weight on her left side made her rest on her foot, and the pain shot up through her leg. She pulled her left hand back and cautiously felt the ground in front of her until she found the place where it gave way to empty space.

“There’s a hole here,” she whispered.

“Can you reach across it?” Cam whispered back.

She tried. She inched forward on her knees until they were right at the lip of the drop off. Then she stretched as far forward as she could safely balance. Her hands definitely could not find the bottom. She did reach the far edge, but she didn’t feel sure at all she could get across it. Not when the ceiling was so low she had to crawl on her hands and knees.

Cam wanted to study the situation himself, so she squirmed backward while he climbed over her. It was awkward having him crawl over her, but it was worth it to be away from the ledge.

After a few moments, she heard him whisper, “We can get across this, but I think we might be better served by going down.”

“Down?” Siobhan squeaked. “I’d rather go up.”

“Not while my former colleagues are here. We want to hide until they leave. And they’ll be coming down here any minute. If I were with them, I’d search the hole. It’s a simple matter of being thorough.”

He continued, “I’ve got a plan. I felt a longer board back in the initial chamber we fell into. I’ll go back and get it. We’ll head down this shaft and pull the board across behind us. That will make it look like, if we were here, we went across and continued on.”

Siobhan really didn’t like the thought of crawling down that pitch black hole, but it was hard to poke holes in Cam’s plan. She agreed, and Cam crawled back over her to go back the way they came and find the board he was sure was there.

That left her sitting all alone in the pitch dark next to a hole that, as far as she knew, had no bottom.

Every sound was magnified. The distant voices of the investigating Shin Bet agents above ground seemed always to be coming nearer. She could hear every single scrape and brush as Cam crawled. All the while, the blackness pressed against her eyes so hard it was nearly a physical sensation.

Finally, Cameron returned.

“I’ll go down first,” he whispered. “Then you get most of the way in, pull the board across the hole so it looks like we used it to cross, and follow me down.”

He made sure she had touched the board so she could keep track of it. Then he crawled over her and awkwardly turned around so his feet would be going down the hole first.

“Hold my forearms as tight as you can,” he whispered. “I may need you to pull me back up if there’s no foothold.”

Siobhan didn’t like the sound of her pulling him back up; he looked like he weighed nearly twice as much as she did, and she pointed that out in a whisper.

“We don’t know for sure what’s down this hole,” Cameron replied. “It’s probably nothing. But it might be anything, including something dangerous. And if one of us has to go into danger first, it will be me.”

She still didn’t think she could pull him up, but after that explanation she agreed.

Cam was holding most of his own weight with his hands gripping the wooden crossbeams of the trail they’d been following. Slowly, he let more and more of his legs down into the hole, and then began to go the rest of the way over. Siobhan added as much grip as she could.

“No foothold yet,” Cam grunted.

That’s when Siobhan heard voices near the tunnel entrance behind them.

“Cam, they’re coming!” she whispered.

He didn’t reply; he just eased more and more of himself over the edge.

“Got it!” he said. “There’s a rock here that will take my weight.”

She couldn’t see him easing down into the hole but behind her she could hear orders being barked in Hebrew and the sound of feet on the ladder.

“Come down, Siobhan,” Cam said. “I’m done with the first foothold now.”

She stayed still for a moment. The prospect of lowering her weight into that unknown depth completely blind, hoping to find one rock capable of supporting her weight, felt foolhardy in the extreme. No matter what Cam might say about Shin Bet interrogations, it had to be better than dying blindly in the dark by falling into a bottomless pit.

In the distance, she saw a flashlight turn on, and that changed her mind.

Inch by inch, she lowered herself down the same way Cam had. The muscles in her hands ached from gripping the boards so hard. Her arms burned from the effort of holding her weight up. She was almost ready to give up and be captured when her toe brushed the rock Cameron had mentioned. She put her weight on it and took a gulping deep breath when it held.

At the last minute, she remembered to pull the board into place, like a bridge across the hole. Balancing her weight carefully on that one foothold, she inched the board across as slowly as she could to avoid excess noise. She even scattered half a handful of dirt on it to improve the illusion they had gone across it.

The next foothold was easier to find. With the third one, she had to grope blindly with her leg at full extension until she finally brushed it with the barest tip of her hiking boot. With every step, she felt her muscles wanting to cramp up from overexertion. Sweat poured off her face in tiny rivers.

Above her head, she heard a curse in Hebrew, and some pebbles fell down onto her head.

Years ago, she’d been taking Hebrew 101 and knew with certainty, one day she’d be fluent in it. But disuse and despair had atrophied her linguistic skills to the point where now she could barely make out the words for “hole” and “careful.”

She held herself perfectly still, salty sweat irritating her eyes. If perspiration made noise, they’d catch her for sure. She prayed vigorously for Cam’s plan to work.

Slowly, one at a time, four Shin Bet agents shimmied across the board.

Once they were gone, and had been gone a long time, she finished the climb down to Cam’s level. The two of them were squeezed together in the hole tighter than if they were slow dancing. There was no light to see him but the physical sensation of closeness was unavoidable.

********

The manhunt for the terrorist Cameron Dorn had grown into an all hands on deck project. Every agent with any kind of field experience was being taken off their other duties and given one simple mission: stop him before he killed again. Everyone understood, whether or not Dorn survived the stopping was immaterial to their Division Director.

All of which worked in Eli Segal’s favor. His one-time exile to the wiretapping bureau was over. He was back in the field. He considered it mildly amusing that the same woman who had delighted in punishing him with the low-status assignment was now setting him free of it. But in the end, it didn’t matter.

Segal wasn’t given a choice about whether to join the hunt for Dorn, of course. But even so, he didn’t come with the same purpose in mind as all the other agents.

Unlike them, he did not believe Dorn was guilty.

Ever since the bombing of al Aziz’s home, the character of the hunt had changed for Segal. Now, his goal was to find out who was framing Dorn and why.

Colleagues had searched every inch of the dig site. Some had even gone so far as to crawl through the underground portions where the archaeologists were working. There had been many signs Dorn had been here, but the man himself had apparently left.

While other agents, more in favor with the Director, searched the dig, Segal was stuck questioning people. He did it with an eye toward what he knew to be true: something else was going on here, rather than Cameron Dorn being a terrorist. As he interviewed suspects at the baking-hot dig site in the southern Negev, his questions had a different character than the other agent who had been assigned the same task.

“Did you see anyone else unusual at the dig today?”

The young student archaeologist had already described Cameron and the American woman perfectly. Apparently, she had met them when they arrived and directed them to the trailer of one Professor Wilson Kendrick, who was in charge of this operation.

She shook her head at the question about anyone else, and Segal dismissed her to question the next worker. This one was male and a few years older but, like the previous, he was an American student of archeology.

“Nope. Didn’t see those two. Heard everyone else talking about them, though. Guess they kidnapped Professor Kendrick or so they say. At any rate, he’s gone from here. No one has seen him since early morning. Never saw those other two myself.”

“Did you see anyone else unusual at the dig today?”

He nodded.

“Yes, I did.”

Segal felt the corners of his mouth ease upward. He had expected to get this answer eventually. It felt good to finally make a bit of progress.

“What can you tell me about this individual?”

Segal asked the question with no expectation whatsoever. He didn’t know who was framing his old partner, so he had no preconceived idea of what the answer should be. He just assumed the physical description would be pretty dark skinned and dark haired, like nearly every single person who lived in the region.

The guy shrugged. “Don’t really know. Was pretty early when he showed up. Barely dawn. A dude for sure. He did have a nasty scar, though. Right under his eye.”

A chill shot through Segal’s body, and the hairs on his arm stood on end.

“Can you remember which eye the scar was under?”

“Don’t know… let’s see… I was facing this way and saw him… okay. Had to be the left. Left eye.”

Segal concluded the interview and did not start another one. Haaris Toma was here. He remembered that cell phone call his clerks had intercepted a piece of a couple days ago. Haaris Toma working to double someone in the Shin Bet. “Double” was a term of art in the intelligence and counter-intelligence business. It meant to cause a person to betray their own side – to become a double agent. Segal suspected the call his clerks had intercepted on Friday was about that very subject. And then Toma showed up here.

He went to talk to Godwin. He located her sitting in one of the workers’ trailers, which she had commandeered for herself. A blast of beautiful cool air greeted him when he opened the door. She was on a call, though, so he stepped back outside to wait.

After a few minutes, he heard “Come!” from inside.

Getting back into the air-conditioned trailer felt wonderful, even if the tiny quarters put him closer to Godwin than he liked.

“What is it, Segal?”

“Haaris Toma was here at the dig, Director Godwin.”

She blinked. Hard.

“What? Impossible.”

“One of the workers saw him. He described Toma’s scar.”

“Just one witness? We can’t treat that as reliable.”

“But such a perfect description of Toma’s identifying feature? ‘A real nasty scar under his left eye.’ We know that’s Toma.”

“Segal, it was barely dawn. You can’t trust anything someone claims to see in light like that. This has nothing to do with Toma. It’s Dorn, pure and simple. We already traced the connection between the kidnapped professor and Dorn’s American accomplice. The connection is obvious. This is his work. He and the woman kidnapped Kendrick. What we don’t know is the exact motive.”

“But—”

“It was Dorn, Segal. No one else.”

Cameron kept them underground until night had well-past fallen above ground. The two of them took turns catching a few winks by leaning up against the wall. They were pressed so closely together falling down wasn’t a risk. As they waited there, immobile, the pain in Siobhan’s ankle slowly subsided.

Only after midnight did they climb up out of the hole and make their way back to the opening to the tunnel. Cam poked his head up from the tunnel. Once he was sure it was clear, he climbed out and then stretched out his hand to help Siobhan up as well.

Cam led the way quickly toward the nearest structure. On other digs in the Holy Land, it was common for workers to live in a nearby kibbutz — the communal farms of Israel. But there was nothing like that in the middle of the Negev, so the workers lived in semi-permanent canvas tents or RV-style trailers.

They passed yellow tape stretched across the area where they had initially confronted Toma and Kendrick. It was easy to recognize as the local equivalent of “Police Line; Do Not Cross.”

Siobhan stepped delicately, avoiding stray pottery shards because they might crunch under her boots and make a noise. She followed Cam as he wound his way among the tents and trailers. He peaked through the windows of each until he found what he wanted.

Siobhan’s eyes went wide as he casually picked the lock of one of the trailers and went in. He motioned for her to wait outside, but he needn’t have worried. She had no desire to go in.

Before long, she barely heard his voice from inside.

“Come on in; no one’s here.”

She poked her head in far enough to see him and then replied, “Cameron, this is someone’s home!”

“I know, but we need their stuff.”

“Breaking and entering, stealing… Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of government agent?”

“Former,” he replied. “And look: I don’t like stealing but unless you want to turn yourself in to my former colleagues and spend three weeks being interrogated before they finally decide you’re innocent, we need supplies. I’ve got some cash in my wallet. I’ll leave them a couple hundred shekels for what we steal.”

“Why is it empty?” Siobhan asked. “Shouldn’t they be here sleeping?”

Dorn replied, “This whole dig is now the site of a government investigation. My former colleagues almost certainly sent everyone away from here to preserve any evidence.”

The trailer was tiny. There was a bed in the far rear, a tiny little bench masquerading as a couch, and what at first blush appeared to be a closet too small for brooms but was actually a toilet and a shower.

To judge by the type of clothing scattered throughout, the resident of this particular trailer was apparently a male. With only moonlight streaming in through the windows, Siobhan watched, mystified, as Cam gathered up a pair of scissors, a razor, swim trunks, and a flash light.

“This is what you mean by supplies?” she whispered.

“I have a plan. We’re going to—”

He cut off in mid-whisper when he heard footsteps outside. At once, he dropped down to the floor, motioning for Siobhan to do likewise. Outside, two voices conversed in Hebrew.

Lying on the floor to avoid being seen through the windows, Cameron inched silently toward the back of the trailer. Without a word, he pointed at Siobhan and then pointed at the minuscule bathroom. The message was clear: “Hide in there.”

Before she could reach it, though, the voices receded into the distance. Cam rose to his knees to peek out the window.

“They’re gone,” he said. “But I should have known they would be here. This just got a lot harder.”

“Who were they?”

“Shin Bet guys. I recognize one of them. Of course, they left a guard here. Since they didn’t find us, they just left a minimal guard while the rest went on looking for wherever the infamous terrorist Cameron Dorn will strike next. We’re lucky we didn’t run into them coming out of the tunnel. In all likelihood, they’re patrolling the whole dig.”

“What do we do?”

Cam replied, “We need to be a lot more careful while we’re gathering your half of the supplies.”

Cam broke into three more trailers until, again judging by the clothes, he hit one that turned out to be a woman’s home. The layout was exactly the same as the others; Kendrick, like most other archaeologists who have to arrange workforce housing, had obviously leased them all from the same supplier. This one was the recipient of a greater decorating effort. Some kitschy signs about friendship hung on the walls. All of them were in English, which didn’t surprise Siobhan all that much. Kendrick likely recruited most of his workforce from American archeology students.

Cam sat down on the tiny couch and began roughly cutting off that curly black hair she loved.

“What are you—”

“This isn’t going to be pleasant. We have a decision to make, Siobhan. Each of us has to make our own. Mine’s already made, but yours may not be.”

His voice remained in a low whisper, not even as loud as the snip of the scissors as he cut his hair.

“I invested too much of my life in capturing Haaris Toma. I gave up my job rather than giving up on catching him. So maybe I was wrong about them trying to build tunnels with all that digging equipment. I guess they’re going to blow up your dig instead. Either way, I’m not letting him get away with it. Not when everything I used to live for has already gone up in smoke over him.”

Cam casually cut his hair while he talked.

“I’m going back to Jerusalem. I’m going to your dig. And I don’t care whether Toma comes out of there in handcuffs or in a body bag. If I’m alive, he’s not coming out free.”

Siobhan blinked. That was blunt. It made her wonder how she sounded when she talked about Kendrick.

“I’ve got to be honest here. I gave you my word I’d get you back to America. There are three ways left to do that. One, you go to the Shin Bet and you turn yourself in. You make sure you’re in their custody when Toma blows up the dig. Then, when he tries to frame you for it, he’ll actually be undoing everything he’s already done because you will have the perfect alibi. You were sitting in a cell when it happened. The investigation will drag on a week or so, and then the Shin Bet will send you home.

“Or else maybe things at the dig go another way. I capture or kill Toma, and that provides evidence you were innocent all along. Either way, the Shin Bet sends you home.”

Awkwardly gathering his hair into fistfuls to attack with the scissors, Cam went on.

“The third way is through the fire with me. Come with me; help me prove this whole thing is a frame up. When we catch Toma in the act of trying to blow up the dig, it will change everything as far as the accusations against us.”

He paused to stare directly into her eyes. He said, “The first two ways are long and it might be traumatic depending on how the interrogation goes. Worse, when you go back to America you won’t have any resolution about your find. If I stop Toma from blowing it up, who knows what the government will do about it. But they’ll probably give the credit to the professionals you worked with through the Dig for a Day program.

“On the other hand,” Cam concluded, “The third way, we could both die. It’s going to be much worse than just hard. First, you have to get through one of the most heavily patrolled cities in the world where every single soldier and cop has been given your name, photograph, and identifying information. And if you make it through all that, there’s likely to be a gunfight at the end. I accepted the risk of death when I first moved to Israel. But I can only make the choice for myself, not for you.”

Siobhan met Cam’s eyes.

“This is what I need to know.”

His reply was only to raise his eyebrows and wait.

“Is it the right thing to do, Cameron? Ibrahim talked about how this might lead to war. You did, too. If we try to stop Toma and save the inscription, will we be responsible for a war?”

Cam replied, “It’s simple for me. Whether or not the inscription actually says what we think, I trust my people. As a society, we won’t vote to destroy the Dome of the Rock. We don’t start wars. So if anything’s going to happen, it will be from extremists on one side or another. Maybe there are Jewish groups who will try to blow it up. I hope not, but it’s possible. Maybe there are Islamic terrorists who will commit violence in Israel just because of some ancient words on a stone. If they do, we’ll beat them. We always have.”

“Will I be a hindrance if I come? Will I just be getting in your way? I don’t even know how to use a gun, let alone have a gunfight.”

“You won’t be in the way. I’ll just leave you behind when things get dangerous. Before then, you’ll actually be a help. I don’t know my way around the inside of that dig.”

Cameron was finished with the scissors. He held out his hand, offering them to her.

“If you do go, we both go all in. That means you do what it takes not to be caught in advance, and that means you’re next for the scissors. I was hoping for hair dye for you. That red hair is way too much of an eye catcher in this country. But I guess people who work underground in the middle of the desert don’t bother with that kind of thing. So we just need to get your hair short enough to hide under a hat.”

Siobhan took the scissors and headed into the bathroom to use the mirror. Maybe Cam could just cut his off, but she had standards.

********

While Dawn was still some time off, Siobhan and Cameron got ready to leave the trailer. The American whose trailer they had robbed had left her passport behind when the Shin Bet cleared out the dig. Siobhan now had it.

The passport was only the beginning of what Cam stole. The dig site wasn’t far from the Dead Sea, that lifeless body of water in the middle of the desert. Lifeless it might be, but it was still good for swimming. And after a week working outdoors in the sun, most of the workers apparently liked to spend their weekends there. Swimwear had been easy to steal.

She understood as soon as Cam did it and felt foolish for not thinking of it herself. Toma and his terrorists were either already back in Jerusalem or on their way. Once there, they would control the main entrance to the original dig site. That made Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the way she had come out the last time, the most likely way for her and Cameron to get in. Her initial slog through that tunnel had been miserable for a lot of reasons, but one of them was her clothes had gotten soaked. The stolen swimwear would help solve that problem.

And if they were going to fight at the end of it, doing it in wet clothes would be worse than stupid.

Cameron left behind all of his shekels to compensate for everything they had stolen, and then the two of them set out into the darkness.

She was about to walk blithely around the corner of the trailer when Cameron grabbed her shoulder and held her back.

Voices around the corner reminded her the dig was guarded.

Cam peeked around the corner quickly, and then pulled his head back. He held his finger to his lips, and Siobhan froze against the wall, silent.

On the other side of the trailer, she could hear voices speaking in Hebrew. As usual, she caught a word or two but not enough to learn anything useful. She knew Cam would hear everything, but that did nothing for her at the moment.

The people on the other side of the trailer – one voice was distinctively female – said something that made Cam reach for the pistol tucked into his pants. He caught Siobhan’s eye and, with the barrel of the gun, traced a motion like going around the corner.

At once, his reasoning became apparent. She could hear the agents walking around the east end of the trailer as Siobhan and Cameron crept around the west end.

She held her breath, hearing them talk to each other as they walked. If the guards turned left at the trailer, they would walk past the door through which she and Cam had just exited. There would be footprints there.

Finally, it became clear the voices were receding, and Siobhan allowed herself a slightly deeper breath. As the agents walked away into the night, Cameron led her toward the parking area.

There was a work truck the archaeologists had left behind, and Cam quickly discovered a spare key magnetically held in the wheel well. He opened both doors and waved Siobhan in.

“Put it in neutral,” he whispered, handing her the key.

She did. Releasing the brake seemed like a good idea, too, since she saw him go to the front of the truck and begin to push.

Silently, it rolled backward away from the dig. Only when they had gone about a hundred yards did Cam run back to the driver’s door and climb aboard.

He started the engine, and Siobhan assumed he must believe they were far enough away from the dig to get away with some noise.

“I don’t know how long their patrol route will last. Based on the size of the dig, it should take them no more than 20 minutes. Sooner or later, they’re going to pass the place where employees used to park. Then they’re going to call this truck in. We can’t stay with it for longer.”

And with that, he floored the gas pedal, trying to gain as much distance toward Jerusalem as he could before time ran out.