The Sinai Secret (31 page)

FORTY-FIVE

Middle Temple Inn

Fleet Street

London

Minutes Later

Jacob listened patiently as Lang brought him up-to-date.

Removing the dead pipe from his mouth, he stared into the bowl as he reached for the nail-like tool. "So, your guess is that those sods in Cairo weren't Mukhabarat at all?"

Lang nodded. "Otherwise they would've called in backup."

Jacob was busily excavating the pipe's bowl. "So, who were they?"

"I think they were Jews. In fact, I think there's some Jewish organization behind this whole thing."

Jacob stopped, his hands for once still as his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. "You're cocking me a snook."

Despite what Churchill described as the barrier of a common language, Lang guessed at the meaning. "No. I'm serious."

"But why...?"

"Okay, let's look at the facts." Lang held up an index finger. "One, the only way those people could have

known I'd contacted Shaffer, the Austrian, was by intercepting a call from my BlackBerry."

"They could have tapped his phone," Jacob argued.

"How would they know to do that? Other than the one call, I'd never spoken to the man before he felt he was being followed, as he clearly was."

Lang flinched at the memory of the corpses in the crypt.

Jacob used the stem of the briar to push the spectacles back into place. "Cell phones are subject to interception."

"Odds of any specific phone are, what, less than hitting the sweepstakes?"

"But the only other way your call could have been intercepted—"

"Would be Echelon," Lang finished the sentence.

Jacob shook his head. "But that's strictly Anglo- American. No one who isn't American, British, Canadian, Australian, or Kiwi has access."

Lang stared at his friend for a few moments.

Jacob finally looked down, running a hand along the edge of the desk as though looking for flaws in the wood. "Dash it all, okay. So, an occasional scrap gets shared with Mossad." He looked up. "But you don't think...?"

"That Mossad's involved? No, I don't. I do think someone
in
Mossad may be, though. In fact,
has
to be. The Israelis are the only people outside the club who ever have access to Echelon. Plus the weapons..."

Jacob snorted. "The Israeli army discarded those Desert Eagles years ago. Too heavy."

"I'd be interested in knowing how they disposed of them."

"You can bloody well bet they didn't hand them out as sodding gifts at bar mitzvahs. The army usually destroys obsolete weapons."

"Humor me; call up old pals and see what you can learn about who was supposed to melt down the guns and who has access to Echelon. I'd bet it turns out to be the same person or persons."

It was clear Jacob wasn't happy but that he'd do it. "Anything else on your great bleeding laundry list?"

"Yeah, what I think is the clincher—"

There was a knock on the door, the one between the outer office and the common hallway. "Police! Open up!"

Jacob looked ruefully over his glasses. "This, as you Yanks say, is where I came in, what with the coppers about to beat the door down just like at my flat the last time you got involved with the wrong people."

Lang stood, but not before more blows fell on the outer door. For once he was thankful for his friend's paranoia that had resulted in the locking mechanism.

"Open up before we knock the door in!"

Lang desperately glanced around the office; the only exit was into the outer office. "I haven't done anything."

Jacob nodded calmly. "Same thing you said last time before you wound up hanging off the bleedin' balcony sixteen floors up. Maybe this time you'd like to explain your innocence?"

There was the sound of something hard smashing into wood.

For whatever reason the police wanted him, Lang wasn't about to surrender, to render himself incapable of movement. It was all too easy to arrange an "accident" once someone was incarcerated.

"Where?"

Another smash.

"Where indeed?" Jacob replied.

FORTY-SIX

At the Same Time

It was like pushing to the top from the bottom of a very dark pond: Light was visible but far away. No, not a pool—the ocean, because consciousness kept coming and going like the tide, leaving a bitter, salty taste in her mouth.

It had been like this for...?

Perhaps hours or years; there was no way to be sure. Too many tides had risen and fallen.

Alicia had only hazy memories, fragments from some nearly forgotten dreams that came as regularly as the waves. At first she thought she could hear them murmuring against a distant shore, but she decided it was only the sound of her own pulse pumping in her temples.

But she knew she had not been in the sea forever, because there was one thing she knew was true, a single bit of memory unclouded, clear, and focused: She had come out of her bathroom in her house, the same way she had every day since moving to Atlanta, and ...

What?

There had been strange men in her bedroom?

The idea seemed absurd, but no more so than the sounds and smells of an airport she thought she remembered. Yet maybe she had been in the hospital. She knew she was in a bed with side rails while a tube of some sort was in her arm. And she couldn't move. There were straps around her arms and legs. But at the same time she was certain—as certain as she could be about anything right now—that she had been in an airplane.

Was that possible?

She supposed it was, that she could have been medevaced somewhere.

But why?

Had she been in some sort of accident on the way to work?

No, she thought it all had more to do with those men in her bedroom.

And Lang. Had he been there?

She sorted through the misty images, tried to put the pieces together to make a single picture, like a child's jigsaw puzzle. No use. There were too many parts missing. Some things, like starting out at home, she was sure of. Others, like the nurse or person whose dark silhouette showed up to replace the tube in her arm, she was not sure were real. One thing she was sure of: The pitch of the engine sounds had changed slightly, and the pressure on her ears told her the plane was descending.

And she seemed closer to reaching the surface of the ocean than before.

The familiar shape was beside her bed. It extended an arm, and lights went on. She tried to shield her eyes before she remembered she could not move her arms or legs.

Even through eyes held almost closed, she could now see a face on the figure. She had seen him somewhere before.

In one hand he had what she recognized as a small recorder. The other held a single sheet of paper.

"Ms. Warner," he said in a voice she also recognized, "I want you to read these lines into the recording device."

The first words she had heard since... since she had found herself at the bottom of the ocean.

FORTY-SEVEN

Middle Temple Inn

London

The only other exit from Jacob's office was two windows behind his desk, the old-fashioned kind that actually opened. In a step Lang slid one pane up and looked out. Two floors down to a concrete walkway that would surely shatter a bone or two on impact. At each end stood a man in a suit with the unmistakable look of a cop. A tree's branches beckoned, but Lang discarded the idea. The sound of him grabbing a leafy bough would alert the pair below.

Another blow and the groan of hinges unable to hold much longer sent Lang through the window to a tenuous perch on the keystone of the arch framing the window below. Face pressed against the building, he extended the fingers of his right hand to claw for purchase in the cracks and crevices of the ancient stone, while his left maintained a death grip on the sill of the window he had just exited.

Another window was to his right, across a tantalizingly short chasm three or four feet away.

Lang forced himself not to look down as his left shoe crept along the extrados of the arch below until it found a narrow hold where centuries of weather had eroded one stone slightly more than the other.

Once, twice, he pawed the air with his right foot.

Inches short.

Lang took one, two deep breaths.

Just as he heard Jacob's voice followed by harsh commands, he lunged. His right foot teetered on the adjacent arch as both hands scraped the sill of the window above. His fingers met impassive stone and began to slip as he pushed with his feet.

At what he would later regard as the last possible second, his fingers grasped a niche running along the sill, a crack perhaps left when the medieval opaque glass shutter-type panes were replaced with ones that opened from the top and bottom.

Mentally offering thanks to a deity of whose existence he was less than certain, Lang worked his fingers underneath the bottom pane and pushed upward. Next door he could hear a voice asking questions in a raised voice. He could not make out Jacob's answers.

He wriggled over and across the sill, falling to the floor inside. Hei was in an office similar to Jacob's, though far more orderly. He paused, hardly daring to breathe, as he waited for the occupants to raise an outcry. As he glanced around the small room, he realized he was alone. The computer terminal on the desk was turned off, as was the gooseneck lamp beside the keyboard. An old-fashioned brass hatrack stood sentinel by the door to what Lang supposed was the outer office. From it hung a barrister's black robe.

Lang stood up and glanced around the space from where he stood, desperate for anything that might be of help when the police began their inevitable search of the building. A small leather box sat on a battered tea table between two club chairs across from the desk. In a step he had the box in hand. He had seen one like that before, seen it...

Opening the hinged top he was rewarded with what he expected: a periwig, the white wig of short hair on top and curls down the sides worn before English juries, just like the one he had seen in Jacob's office a few years before.

Feeling more than slightly silly, he perched it on his head and slipped on the robe. A bit short, but it would have to do.

He grabbed a briefcase before fumbling with a cranky dead bolt on the front door and letting himself out into the hall.

A group of what he gathered were the building's tenants was gathered around the open door of Jacob's office, curious as to what had caused the police to interrupt the centuries of scholarly discourse and professional courtesy at the Middle Temple Inn. No one was interested in a lone barrister, briefcase in hand, scurrying for the staircase and the Old Bailey across the street. The two men guarding the entrance were too busy speculating what was going on inside to notice a barrister late for court, head down, searching the depths of his attaché for some critical paper as he hurried along.

Once across Fleet Street, Lang submitted to the metal detectors of London's oldest criminal court and entered the rabbit warren that had been in use for four hundred years, although most criminal cases were now heard in newer quarters. He paused at a door marked with a primitive figure of a man above the letters
WC
and went inside. Making sure he was alone, he deposited wig, gown, and briefcase inside one of the toilet stalls and left the building by a side door.

Lang ducked into the first London Underground entrance he came to. He wished it were later in the day, making it easier to hide among the commuters who would flood the system in an hour or so. As it was, he felt conspicuous sharing a nearly empty car. His only companions were a pair of nannies conversing in some African dialect over the howls coming from matching prams, and asingle man, intent on a racing form advertising the services of Murphy and Quint, Turf Accountants.

As he changed to the Picadilly line, one of the infants was still managing to voice its outrage around the bottle with which his nanny had unsuccessfully tried to quiet him.

Had the British had to deal with their own squalling offspring, they would never have had time to raise the Union Jack over half the world.

Mary Poppins: the cornerstone of empire.

In a car filled largely with American tourists headed for London's largest shopping and entertainment district, Lang felt oddly alien. He envied them their laughter, the fact that they were here purely for the pleasure of travel.

How had the cops known where he would be? Most likely because of the incidents a few years ago, when Jacob had been identified as a contact in the city. Okay, he told himself, but how had they even known he was in the country? His passport had drawn no more than a perfunctory electronic scan upon arrival.

He had only to glance up at a camera attached to the car's ceiling. Surveillance equipment. As common in London as fish and chips. He had been made before he even left the airport.