by Fritz Galt
The elevator doors opened and a strobe light flashed in her eyes.
The nurse held up a hand to shield Rachel from view.
“Miss Levy,” a man called. “Do you know who did this to you?”
Rachel saw well-dressed men in black suits holding back the press.
More flashes and then a huge light flooded the lobby. Rachel was ready to turn around and head back into the elevator. Her hair was barely brushed and the hospital robe was a hideous embarrassment.
“No comment,” she mumbled.
“Hey, let the patient through,” the nurse said, the softness gone from her voice.
Rachel caught the logo on a television camera. It was no local station. It was CNN. While she had recuperated in bed, her story must have grown into something big.
“Did you see the terrorist?” someone asked.
She nodded tentatively.
“Are you able to identify him?”
She remembered the thorough interrogation that the FBI had conducted. She had been on the verge of fingering Dean Wells as the man she saw jumping out of her car and running. But she wasn’t completely sure and had said nothing. She didn’t want to implicate Dean who seemed to be a perfectly nice man. She was sure the media would seize on anything she said and blow it out of proportion.
But she had given out details to the FBI: Caucasian, under six feet tall, blond hair. In her present condition and mental confusion, she wasn’t about to repeat the description to the press.
An FBI sketch artist had drawn the features as she described them. And the result pretty much looked like Dean Wells.
A reporter tried to get her to talk into a microphone, but a plainclothesman shoved him back. Another mike reached overhead on a boom.
She pressed her lips tight. If she were going to implicate Dean, it would not be in front of a lynch mob.
“Was it this man?” a reporter said, and thrust a newspaper into her face. Flashbulbs went off everywhere.
The sight of his face gave her a moment of panic. The image of the man crouched by her car just before it exploded was staring her in the face.
Now that the sketch had been released to the public, everybody was going to look for Dean Wells.
How was he going to react? Would he come after her again? What was going to happen to him once he stepped off the plane after his trip to Hebron?
But the sketch showed a swarthy version of Dean, one with menacing eyes and flared nostrils. The press had made him into a monster.
She tore her attention away from the newspaper.
“Is that the terrorist?” the reporter pressed.
She resisted giving any response.
“Okay. That’s all, folks,” the nurse said, her voice now booming. “She has no comments to make at this time.”
Rachel shuffled through the crowd and the outside door slid open. The men in black suits prevented everyone but Rachel, the nurse and the county policeman from exiting.
The hospital was in a quiet area with a large lawn and a busy road in the distance. “Where are we?”
“Fairfax Hospital,” the nurse said. She put her pinkies in the corners of her mouth and produced a piercing whistle.
A yellow cab pulled up.
Rachel crawled into the back seat. The door slammed shut, and the nurse and cop drifted out of sight.
“Where to, madam?”
Where had she heard that accent before?
She straightened up and looked at the driver. From his proud profile and dark complexion, she zeroed in on the accent.
“You’re Palestinian,” she said.
“Guilty as charged, madam.”
All the phobias of her Jewish upbringing kicked in. She had been delivered into the arms of a…
“You asked where I wanted to go?” she said, incredulous.
“Would you like me to take a right or a left at the main road?”
The question sounded oddly normal. Maybe he wasn’t kidnapping her.
Okay. So where was she going?
She didn’t want a total stranger taking her to her apartment. Who knew what the man really had in mind?
She had no neighbors or immediate friends to call upon for help. Going to work was her best option.
“Take me to Langley.”
Chapter 25
In the back seat of the taxicab, Rachel reached into her bag of personal effects and found her cell phone. She placed a call to the office and asked for her boss.
Sidney Allen’s deep, rich voice came on the phone. “How are we feeling today?”
“Crappy, but I’m coming to work anyway.”
“Why? You ought to be recuperating.”
“Frankly, I don’t have anywhere better to go. I have no car, no protection. I don’t even have proper clothes.”
“Nobody’s guarding you?”
“No. So just to let you know, I’m expecting a professor from Columbia University. Let him know I’ll be a little late.”
“Rachel!”
“I’m hanging up now.”
The cab let her off at a long line of cars waiting to get in the front gate of the CIA. Walking past all her poor colleagues who had to wait for security to let them in, she began to wonder what was causing the holdup.
She had to convince the guard to let her in. She was a disheveled woman in a hospital robe trying to enter the headquarters of the nation’s elite intelligence agency. It looked more like she was checking into a mental institution.
However, she did have her ID badge. One look at her, and the guard was on the phone to his supervisor.
Fortunately, word quickly reached Matt Nelson, head of Personnel Security.
“Good God. We lost her at the hospital,” Matt’s voice thundered over the line. “Let her in, for God’s sake.”
The guard held the phone away from his ear and let her walk in.
A line of cars followed her bedraggled body up the drive.
Matt ran breathlessly out the front door. “Let’s get you to Medical on the double.”
“No,” she said. “I just came from a hospital.”
“Why didn’t you wait for our men to drive you?”
“I wasn’t offered a ride.”
Matt was on the verge of exploding.
“Don’t worry. I got a ride from a very nice cabby. Now I’ll just head over to my office.”
“Not dressed like that. We’ll find you something to wear.”
He steered her around the building to the security office.
“Look,” she said. “Unless you have a pair of nylons and panties in your desk drawer, why don’t you just get me one of those security uniforms and that’ll get me through the day.”
“Okay. It won’t look great, but it’ll do.”
Ten minutes later, she emerged from a women’s room in a starched white shirt and dark pants.
She straightened the epaulets on her shoulders. “I’m ready for work now.”
Sidney Allen was pacing in the receptionist’s area at the Language Department.
“Look at you,” he said, and gave a belly laugh. “Ain’t nobody gonna mess with you again.”
She was ready to forget all that had happened to her over the past forty-eight hours. “Is Dr. Friedman here?”
“Waiting in your lab.”
She walked through the maze of cubicles. Colleagues popped out to greet her. One employee stood and started clapping. Soon the entire office was on their feet applauding.
She buried her face in her hands and walked as quickly as she could.
“Shalom,” came a voice from within her lab.
The greeting jolted her back to work.
It was Professor Saul Friedman, the renowned scholar of Hebrew. He bowed politely from a slight distance, revealing a small, black kippah on his bald spot. “I heard about the terrorist attack,” he said with concern. “I wasn’t sure if I should come.”
“I’m glad you did. Sorry I couldn’t explain over the phone why I needed you.”
>
She hesitated before going into the reason for her call. Two days earlier, she wouldn’t have thought twice about allowing a scholar to examine the pages of the Aleppo Codex. But after the car bomb nearly killed her, she no longer knew whom to trust. Barry had come across as working for the Israeli intelligence service, only to be a CIA employee with protection against terrorists. Dean, who had seemed the model employee, now appeared in random flashes of memory squatting beside her car just before the bomb went off.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and tried to rub life into her cheeks. Several fingers were bandaged. “I’m still dealing with a lot.”
She went to the safe and hesitated once again.
“Would you mind turning away for a second?”
The professor shuffled to face the far wall.
She pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, then punched in the combination of the safe. She pulled out the stainless steel tray covered by foil. “I’ll have to dim the lights.”
She didn’t want to influence the professor’s assessment in identifying the codex pages, but she had to be careful to protect them. With the door locked, the lights off and the red light turned on, she removed the foil.
The neatly written text looked fake in the red glow, but the musty smell spoke of great age.
Dr. Friedman stood beside her in silence. At last he pulled his glasses onto his forehead and leaned close to study the manuscript. He moved his lips as he read the ancient text. Since the pages were so old, she should have given him a facemask.
“My dear,” he said at last. “How many such pages do you have?”
“Five.”
“Five pages of The Keter.” The reverence in his voice was profound.
She let out her breath. He had reached the same conclusion that she had. It was The Keter, The Crown. The Aleppo Codex.
She spread the five pages side by side as she had determined their order. It began with Abraham and ended with Moses. They lay on the table like windows into the past and into the origins of the Torah.
“Where in the world did you get this?” he asked.
Once again, she was thinking about Dean Wells. She imagined him in the lab with her. Who was the real Dean Wells?
“I can’t tell you how this came to my attention.”
“You’ll have to turn it over to the Israeli government,” he said. “It belongs in Jerusalem with the rest of the book.”
She had considered the ownership question and come to the same conclusion. “How do you know it’s the Aleppo Codex?”
“These are not the marks of newer manuscripts,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake that William Wickes made in 1887 when he examined the photograph of a chapter from Genesis and declared that it didn’t represent the Ben Asher system and therefore was not an exact copy of the Bible. No, these are earlier markings produced by Masoretic scribes. They were made only during the period in which The Keter was inscribed.”
“I’d decided it had to be Masoretic.”
“See these other marks? They represent the cantor’s intonation. How to sing the verse.” He began humming to himself, as if testing whether the tones fit those chanted during modern-day readings of the Torah.
The tune seemed out of place in her laboratory, a shrine to science and government work.
“These pages have been through a lot,” he said. “Such a long and difficult journey.”
She had only a vague understanding of the bizarre history of how the codex ended up in Aleppo and was happy to let the professor recount the tale.
“These pages were inscribed by the renowned Masorete, Aaron Ben Asher, in Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Many preceding generations in the Ben Asher family performed painstaking transcriptions. In fact, their transcription of the scrolls was so exact that they reproduced spelling errors and misshapen characters exactly as they appeared in the original scrolls. But Aaron added one more element.”
“Vocalization,” she said.
He nodded. “Before him, there was the oral tradition of reading the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and there were the Western Semitic texts, which contained only consonants. He put the two together for the very first time.”
“It’s like an audio recording.”
His dark eyes flashed toward her. “More than that. It’s impossible to be sure of the meaning of the original text without knowing the pronunciation. That gave us meaning.”
He faced the pages with profound respect and humility. “Sometime shortly after 920, Aaron Ben Asher placed his quill on this parchment and gave the world the Bible as it was meant to be read. Two brothers safeguarded the codex in Jerusalem for many years. But there were troubles further north that resulted in the First Crusade.”
“I thought the Crusades were a response to Muslim interference with Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land.”
“That’s a dated interpretation. The early Eleventh Century Fatimid Shiite caliph al-Hakim did persecute Christians in Palestine, but things improved after al-Hakim’s death. The Crusades began at the end of the Eleventh Century for geo-political reasons, namely to relieve Seljuk Turk pressure on the Byzantines who had suffered a disastrous defeat at Manzikert in 1071. The pope, frustrated with internecine fighting between Christian rulers in Europe, hoped to redirect their energy to the Holy Land.”
She felt sufficiently chastised for blaming the Crusades on the Muslims. “Back to the book,” she said.
The professor hovered over the parchment. “These pages survived the Fall of Jerusalem in 1099 when Crusaders plundered the Holy Land. You’d think the knights would have burned the book. Incredible as it sounds, they took it and other holy works, Torahs and hundreds of Jews, to Egypt to ransom for money.”
“…giving new life to the codex.”
“That’s right. The Karaite elders in Ascalon on the Mediterranean coast finally scraped together the money to pay the ransom. The Karaites, as you know, to this day only subscribe to the Tanakh and not the oral law and other interpretations.”
“Are there any Karaites still around?”
“I had coffee with one yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“Nice fellow. He’s a great graphic designer with a very nice practice. Just doesn’t believe in following the Mishnah and Talmud. Where was I?”
“The Karaite elders…”
“Oh yes. Soon thereafter, it was transferred to the Rabbanites in Cairo, who protected the book in their synagogue for nearly three centuries. Then in 1375, a descendant of Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar, took it to Syria, where it remained guarded in the cave of Elijah.”
Rachel recalled reading that the cave had become part of the basement of a synagogue.
“There it remained guarded for over six hundred years, available only to the Jewish community, but shown on rare occasions to scholars. When the United Nations granted the Jews their own state in 1947, Arabs rioted throughout the Muslim world. By all accounts, the synagogue was looted and the sacred book was destroyed in the ensuing fire.”
On the edge of each page, she saw darkness that could easily be mistaken for charring.
The professor lifted his eyes to the red lights. “Then out of the Syrian desert, an Aleppo Jewish merchant mysteriously appeared in Turkey and turned over more than half of the pages. Parts of the book had been rescued from the destroyed synagogue, and for over a decade, what remained of the Jewish community in Syria had safeguarded the pages.”
He studied the manuscript.
“But these pages weren’t among those returned,” he said. “Where did you get them?”
She wanted to complete the story and tell of the bookshop in Syria. Like Jewish communities around the world, it was an unlikely survivor in hostile lands. But how likely was it that the ancient parchment had sat in a bookshop for so many years? Suddenly she doubted Dean’s story as much as she had come to doubt him.
When she wouldn’t respond to his question, the professor sighed. “It reads correctly.” And he began t
o chant the words in a soft voice.
“But is it real? Can you establish its authenticity?”
He shook his head. “You’d need an art historian for that.”
An art historian? That was slightly out of her field. She was a linguist who approached languages as growing, evolving and aging species. She didn’t have the equipment to carbon date morsels of the past.
She let the professor turn the pages over and study the other sides, humming to himself.
Who did art history in Washington? There were many museums nearby. Washington was a city of curatorial organizations from the Smithsonian to the various art galleries. But they mostly dealt in scientific artifacts or paintings. She looked at the wrinkled parchment. What she had was not paint or canvas. Who restored old documents?
Then she remembered the battle to preserve the nation’s oldest records, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Those were in a fragile state after less than 250 years. Was the red light too bright for the ink?
“Excuse me, please.” She hurried past him and dialed the agency’s operator. “Put me through to the National Archives.”
Chapter 26
It was early dawn in Hebron, the sun just below the horizon.
Dean woke to the sound of a muezzin calling people to prayer. The loudspeakers rocketed off the stone buildings in the city below and reached the Jewish settlement with equal force.
It was Friday, the end of the week and a day of prayer for most citizens of Hebron.
The previous evening had been traumatic for Dean. Isolated in his quarters in the settlement, he tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
Twice in a row, his contacts had been slain in front of him. Who was trying to frame him?
The nagging question would not go away, but he had to put it aside and plan for the future.
He dragged out of bed and headed for the refrigerator.
Despite yesterday’s death, he had made progress. Now he knew the person he needed to reach was Omar al-Farak. He envisioned Omar’s photograph hanging in every Palestinian home someday.
As foreign minister, Omar was the likely choice for president of the Palestinian Authority once the current president stepped down and the summer elections were held.
