The Sinai Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  "I'll take that, Mr. Reilly."

  Lang turned slowly. Leather Jacket and another man stood just inside the door. Each held an automatic obscured by a silencer.

  The two men were a good five feet apart. No chance Lang could draw the SIG Sauer from its holster and fire before at least one of the intruders could shoot.

  Lang slowly raised his hands, his fingers manipulating the envelopes so that one was squarely behind the other. "What can I do for you, gentlemen?"

  Leather Jacket motioned with his weapon. "The envelope you have in your hand, Mr. Reilly, put it on the counter and slide it towards me."

  The question was whether these two intended to take what they had come for and leave or make sure Lang did not trouble them further. The silencers on each gun did not suggest a happy ending. It was unlikely a man would risk carrying something that bulky if he had no intention of using it.

  If Lang was going to do something, now seemed about the right time.

  But what?

  PROLOGUE

  Mount Horeb Sinai Peninsula March 1904

  Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie was astonished but certainly not pleased by his discovery.

  His expedition had been funded by the Egypt Exploration Fund for the purpose of revisiting and mapping the area of mining activity by the ancient Egyptians between the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba. Like so many explorers before him, he had found something quite different from the object of his search.

  Although this was supposedly Mount Sinai, the mountain from which Moses had brought down the Ten Commandments, Petrie had no particular expectations. The place was in the area he was surveying, so the expedition had struggled up the sharp outcrop to its summit. Instead of more craggy red sandstone boulders, scrubby brush, and a surplus of scorpions, they were viewing something totally unexpected.

  Jutting out from what was clearly a man-made cave were remnants of walls of ancient handmade brick. The southern side of the walls had long ago been abraded by sand blown by millennia of wind, the consistent gritty, hot breeze Petrie had come to think of as the breath of the desert. The northern side still displayed a patina of the painted plaster that had once covered the crude bricks. In the plaster were inscriptions, hieroglyphics that Petrie recognized as possibly dating back to the Twelfth Pharaonic Dynasty of about 2600 b.c.

  Long before Moses.

  This presented a problem.

  The articles of association of the sponsoring Egypt Exploration Fund were quite clear: One of its objectives was excavation and exploration for the purpose of confirming or elucidating the Old Testament. This was the mountain where Moses had spoken with God in the form of a burning bush; from which he had brought down not one, but two sets of commandments; and at the base of which he had burned the idolatrous golden calf.

  Petrie's discovery was tantamount to betraying his friends and sponsors, something no English gentleman could countenance.

  Making the find public would certainly lose future financing from the fund. It could well lead to disgrace, even his loss of privileges at the Explorers' Club in Mayfair.

  He wished he had never seen this wretched mountain.

  Still, he and his exploration team were here, and not even investigating the site would be wasteful indeed.

  By sunset the shifting sands had yielded an impressive collection of tablets, statues, and tools typical of a temple. Petrie was confident the next day would reveal an altar and other evidence of worship of the oft-depicted Hathor, the goddess of love, tombs, gold, and song, and from whose milk pharaohs gained immortality. There was no doubt about the god pictured: No other deity had cow horns and a solar disk on its head.

  By the time dinner was over and the native porters had erected tents for him and the three other Englishmen,

  Petrie had decided to simply submit his findings and let the Fund decide what use to make of them.

  A bother, that. He had planned to publish an account of this exploration himself.

  By the next afternoon loose sand had been removed from a number of halls and chambers. Reliefs of various pharaohs and their favorite wives, sons, and chamberlains were uncovered, but not the main altar.

  What had been discovered was a series of rectangular and round holes carved into the sandstone, each hole larger than a bathtub. Petrie had never seen anything quite like them, and their possible function eluded him. The discovery of a metallurgist's crucible and perhaps several pounds of an unidentified white powder beneath a stone floor was equally puzzling. Perhaps it was the strange object frequently mentioned in the inscriptions on the walls and surrounding stelae. He certainly had no other idea what the word referred to. He had never seen it before. Even more mysterious was why a crucible would be in a temple in the first place.

  It was referred to again in a portrayal of Anubis, the jackal-god who led the deceased into the afterlife. The animal was lying on an ark while the pharaoh Amenhotep presented a conical object. The inscription stated something about giving gold and rejoicing mouths.

  Another search revealed no gold, only the enigmatic white powder.

  Like any competent archaeologist, Petrie recorded his findings, completed his excavation (without locating the missing altar), and continued the survey he had been sent to complete.

  Having apparently reached some sort of peace with the Fund, he published a short book on his exploration, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel, in 1910. His discoveries might have caused reactions in the academic world had the real discovery not been overshadowed by the storm clouds of two world wars.

  Again, like many explorers, he had set in motion forces he could not have imagined. No one in early twentieth-century Europe could have.

  ONE

  Stift Melk an der Donau (on the Danube)

  Austria

  The present

  Joseph Steinburg, Ph.D., stood at the two-story entrance facing the afternoon sun. In front of him, the hill on which the first part of the monastery had been built in the tenth century dropped precipitously into the rushing gray waters of the Danube. Behind him was the library. Fifty-foot-high book-lined walls ran the three-hundred- foot length of the huge room.

  From the chapel below came the vesper chants of the thirty or so monks who still occupied that part of the baroque abbey not presently used as a parochial school. He paid no attention, if, in fact, he even heard.

  Were it not for the boat pushing barges upstream and the cars humming along the highway across the river, Steinburg could have been anywhere in time within the last millennium.

  He wasn't thinking about that, either.

  He could only ponder the strange discovery that had occupied him for the last two days.

  A year ago the abbey had begun the awesome task of creating a computer index of the library, including the two thousand-plus volumes that dated back to the ninth through the fifteenth centuries. Last week one of the graduate students had discovered a number of bound parchments in ancient Hebrew, perhaps misplaced in the panic to hide all things of value that ensued when, in 1683, Kara Mustafa and his two hundred thousand Turks laid siege to Vienna, just fifty miles to the east. Although the Turks were forced to withdraw only three months later, these documents had, most likely, not been returned to their proper place, remaining with what were at the time current religious writings. The Church had asked Steinburg, part-time archeologist and full-time professor of ancient Hebrew history, to translate and date the documents.

  From the heavy parchment and ink, Steinburg guessed the physical pages themselves could be as old as Melk. But the events they described were older, much older. The unusual syntax, phrases borrowed from pharaonic Egyptian, indicated that someone had painstakingly translated a chronicle from, say, 1500 to 1200 b.c. Or, to be politically correct, b.c.e., befor
e the Common Era. In any event, before Hebrew itself was recognizable as a written language.

  A cautious man, Steinburg turned around and walked back inside to one of the rolling ladders on rails, climbed to the top tier, and examined the exact area where the material had been found. Sure enough, the neighboring volumes all dated from the mid- to late-seventeenth century.

  Once back on the parquet floor, he returned to the table where the parchments were unrolled. He pulled on the surgical gloves that protected the documents from any acid that might be contained in the moisture of his skin, then turned to the laptop on which he was composing a draft of his translation. He was aware of the irony of the anachronism, using electronic transcription in a place where manuscripts had been hand-copied for centuries.

  But how did these documents come to be here in Austria in the first place?

  If Steinburg had to guess, a pursuit he loathed as a professor but had to embrace as an archaeologist, he would say the ancient parchment had found its way to Europe as a trophy of the Crusades, most likely the third, when Duke Leopold V had held the English king, Richard the Lionheart, for ransom at his castle at Dürnstein, just a few kilometers down the Danube, where ruins of its towers could still be seen. Possibly these pages had been brought to Melk from the centuries-old castle of some former crusader for safekeeping before the Turks breached the castle walls. A number of families in this area dated their ancestry back that far.

  Steinburg sighed his relief at having at least theoretically solved the mystery of the papers' origin.

  How the Church—or, for that matter, the world—was going to solve the consequences of his discovery was another issue.

  Two hours later, he stood and glanced around the room.

  Ancient or not, the facts narrated in the documents could have very contemporary implications.

  Serious implications.

  Implications far beyond the halls of abstract academia or the dusty pages of history.

  He could simply return the documents to oblivion in their place among the top row of books and leave Melk, hoping his translation of both Hebrew and old German would likewise be lost in obscurity. But somehow that didn't seem a satisfactory option. Part of his compensation for his work was right to publish his findings in his choice of scholarly journals. The information had value to some people if published, perhaps even more if not.

  At any rate, he had no intent of shunning the acclaim his work would earn. The purpose of academia was to disseminate knowledge, like a breeze laden with the parachutes of dandelion seeds. How it was used was not his to question.

  He had not noticed that a frail glow from electric sconces now illuminated the cavernous room, the sun having long set. He wondered if the abbey's lightbulbs were intentionally dim to simulate the candles that had burned here for centuries.

  He stood, nodding as though reaching an agreement with himself. Reaching into his computer's traveling case, he produced a disk and copied the notes he had spent the last two days inputting. Then he e-mailed the draft of his translation to his home computer. Better backup than a disk. Tomorrow he would print out both his translations along with his notes, and send it to the abbey.

  But for now...

  Well, he could look forward to at least a modicum of academic recognition, perhaps even more than his cousin, the scientist.

  Then he had an idea.

  Documents in hand, he walked out of the library, down several halls, and across a courtyard to where by day a gift shop sold souvenirs, books, and religious medals. Behind the shop was a small office, one to which Steinburg had been given a key yesterday when he needed to send a fax. The door to the outside was closed and bolted for the day but yielded easily to his key. If he remembered correctly...

  Yes, the fax machine was also a photocopier. Closing his mind to the potential damage that might be done to the documents, he carefully placed them one by one on the glass plate.

  His cousin in Amsterdam had mentioned a project that might make these old writings interesting. But if he sent these, Benjamin would have them for months, perhaps a year before Steinburg could publish. Not a problem. His cousin Benjamin was also a professor, but of some sort of exotic science. Analytical chemistry, theoretical physics—Steinburg wasn't sure.

  He opened the desk and extracted a bulky envelope and a roll of stamps. He quickly jotted a note requesting the copies either be destroyed of hidden until he published. He estimated the stamps required, addressed the envelope, and dropped it in the sack of mail to be picked up the next day.

  He smiled. That ought to get him back for the unintelligible formula his cousin had published last year, a theoretical equation that had caused a mild stirring in scientific journals. These Hebrew scrolls were going be bigger, much bigger than Benjamin's theory.

  The two had been friendly rivals since childhood, and now Steinburg would be one up.

  A glance at his watch told him he would be late getting home to Vienna. Locking the office, he returned to the library, exited away from the river, crossed a courtyard, and found his ancient but immaculate Volkswagen Beetle in a gravel parking lot now deserted by the daily tour buses. He drove out the gate, away from the abbey's manicured grounds, and onto the road leading to the bridge. In his rearview mirror, Melk's twin towers and dome were fading in the growing dusk.

  By the time he reached the narrow bridge high above the Danube, Steinburg had an idea which publications would be given the opportunity to see his work.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a pair of lights behind him. From their height above the road it had to be a truck.

  Strange. Trucks were expressly forbidden on this bridge.

  And the damn thing was speeding, too.

  Steinburg realized what was going to happen only an instant before the crunch of metal against metal sent the Volkswagen crashing into the side railing of the bridge.

  He felt a jolt of fear. No way was that rampart going to hold, to keep his car from smashing through into the void below.

  He was quite right.

  TWO

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  0423 EST

  The ringing of the telephone beside the bed brought Phillip Hansler, the president of the United States, to groggy awareness. He groaned softly as his eyes took in the time on the digital clock next to the phone. As he fumbled the receiver to his ear, he thought the obvious: He was through with sleep for the night. Only his chief of staff had access to this line, and no one called at this hour with good news.

  Rather than wake his wife beside him, he sat up without turning on a light. "Yeah?"

  "Good morning, Mr. President. The Iranian situation has gotten out of hand. The Joint Chiefs are on their way, should be in the situation room within the next ten minutes."

  The president hung up without reply before he slipped from beneath the covers, feet groping for the slippers he had left beside the bed.

  "Shall I order up some coffee?" The question came from the mound in the covers beside where he had been.

  There was at least a skeleton crew manning the White House kitchen twenty-four hours a day.

  The president was shuffling toward the bathroom. "No need. There'll be plenty where I'm headed."

  The very mention of the place gave him chills. Far below the White House, the situation room was actually a series of rooms, including bath and kitchen facilities, that had been constructed as an emergency bunker during the Cold War in case an imminent nuclear attack did not allow enough time for the president to evacuate Washington. Equipped with the most advanced communications, it still served as a command post in times of national emergency.

  Minutes later the president stood in front of the elevator just outside his private living quarters. He could already hear a cacophony of sirens growing louder. He checked his watch. The military cavalcade and its escorts would be right on time.

  As the president entered the conference room, the three commanding generals and one admiral
snapped to attention. The president imagined he could hear the jangle of medals. How did these guys get all that brass and ribbon on so quick, anyway? They must have multiple sets, each already pinned to fresh uniforms.

  The president gave a cursory nod. "Be seated, gentlemen, please."

  Four sets of pressed and starched rear ends plopped into chairs. A white-jacketed orderly appeared with a carafe of coffee and a stack of cups just as the White House chief of staff, the secretaries of state and defense, and the director of intelligence slid into their places.

  "Shall we wait until we can find the vice president?" the chief of staff asked.

  Not unless you intend to search every single woman's apartment in Washington, the president thought. A widower of two years, the vice president had become difficult to reach on short notice at night and on weekends, behavior that would have to be modified if the man's obvious ambitions were to be realized.

  The president shook his head. "Have someone continue to try to reach him. In the meantime let's not keep everyone waiting."

  The president gave a grateful nod to the coffee server and took a steaming cup from the tray. "Okay, I know you didn't get me up at this hour for the pleasure of my company." He nodded to Jack Allen, a black navy admiral in his late fifties, the first member of his race to reach that rank and only the second to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  "What's up, Jack?"

  The admiral pointed to a huge flat-screen monitor displaying the Near East from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. A red dot was moving east to west.

  The admiral spoke in a bass so deep the president had remarked that it sounded like it came from somewhere beneath his feet, the voice of an Old Testament prophet. "The picture, Mr. President, is a real-time satellite relay, and represents six K-twelve or SUMA missiles, each capable of carrying ten or more separate warheads, possibly nukes. They were launched from three different sites in the Iranian desert, sites our satellites never picked up. Probably underground."