by Gregg Loomis
If monochromatic cloth qualified as art.
Rachel met him with a hug and a kiss that smelled of gin. "Langford! How delightful to see you again!" She pressed a frosted stem glass into his hand. "A very dry martini! See, I remembered!"
Lang was reasonably certain he had had his customary single-malt last time. He had quit martinis ever since Dawn, his wife, had described them as "silver mumblers- have two and you're mumbling."
He accepted the drink as gracefully as possible, looking for a potted plant that might surreptitiously enjoy it more than he. Or at least not show the consequences of imbibing straight alcohol. "Rachel! You have not aged a day. And am I mistaken or have you lost a few pounds?"
Neither was remotely true, but one of the very few things Lang had learned about women was that those two phrases were always appreciated. Actually, losing weight was the last thing Rachel needed to do. He had often thought that if she turned sideways, she would present no shadow. He supposed she maintained that figure to enjoy the miniskirts she favored, one of which she was wearing tonight. With blunt-cut hair the color of midnight and a face Lang was certain had put at least one plastic surgeon's children through college, she could have passed for Jacob's daughter.
"Only pounds she's lost is at sodding Fortum and Mason." Jacob grumbled as he entered from the bedroom.
Lang noticed he had a glass of Scotch.
Rachel whirled away toward the kitchen. She did not walk; step, or move by any mundane means; she danced, tiptoed, pirouetted, or spun. Lang supposed a ballet teacher had also been enriched by knowing her.
"Oh, I have some very special hors d'oeuvres I made just for you," she called over a shoulder.
A potted plant was now a necessity.
Seeing none, Lang stepped over to the sliding glass doors, opened them, and stepped onto the narrow ledge that Jacob generously referred to as a balcony. The last time Lang had been out here he had been hanging underneath by his fingertips.
"Do you mind?" he called inside. "It's a pleasant night, and your view of Westminster is the best in the city."
The darkness permitted him to jettison both martini and the hors d'oeuvre Rachel insisted he sample. He feigned sipping at an empty glass until Jacob announced it was time to leave for the restaurant.
All three shoehorned into the Morris, Lang soon regretted his gallantry in insisting on riding in the car's mere symbol of a backseat.
"Bloody hell!" Jacob growled. "I left my bleedin' wallet in my office!"
"No problem," Lang said, feeling as if he were speaking between his knees. "It's my treat, anyway."
"You'll not want to pick up the chit if I get stopped by some sodding copper wanting driver's permit and insurance card."
"The Middle Temple Inn isn't so far out of the way," Rachel soothed.
"No, but parking's a problem, and driving round the block's a bother with the one-way streets. You two'll have to sit in the car while I dash in."
Although one way, Fleet Street wasn't wide enough to accommodate curbside parking. A blare of horns from usually polite Londoners when Jacob stopped made it clear another plan was in order.
Lang resisted the temptation to remind his friend that he had suggested the tube.
Jacob sighed in resignation. "There's a car park a block over."
Lang and Rachel made listless efforts to make conversation before becoming quiet.
After what Lang guessed would be ten minutes, she stirred. "Shouldn't take him this long to find his wallet."
"Have you seen his office lately?"
She chuckled. "Heavens, no! Last time I went in there I was afraid something would fall on me. Besides, the dear man guards the place as if it were top-secret. It's his exclusive domain."
Ten minutes later Lang squeezed out of the car. "Exclusive domain or not, I think I'd best see what's taking so long."
Rachel pulled the key out of the ignition. "I'll come along."
The old Templar temple was dark, the surrounding grounds more shadow than light. Only one or two office windows were illuminated. A single bulb on each landing showed the way upstairs. English barristers did not work the hours of their American counterparts.
The dimness of the second floor made the light from under Jacob's door all the more visible. Lang was reaching for the knob when he stopped. The voice he had just heard was not Jacob's.
Using one hand to put a finger to his lips, he used the other to gently push Rachel against the wall before putting an ear against the wood of the door. It gave slightly. Whoever had last entered hadn't pulled it completely shut.
Lang tried to recall whether the hinges had squeaked that afternoon.
He pushed it open only wide enough to put his face to the crack. Jacob was facing him, speaking to a man whose back was toward Lang, From Jacob's expression, the visitor was no friend.
"Again," Jacob said, "I have no bloody idea what you're talking about. You've jolly well tossed the office and haven't found whatever you're looking for…"
The man said something Lang couldn't hear and gestured with a gun in his hand.
Then Jacob saw Lang. Or at least, Lang thought he did. Not wanting to alert the intruder, he had given only the slightest twitch of an eye.
Lang shifted slightly, trying to see as much of the room as possible. His choice of action was going to vary if there was another person in the office.
"What…?" Rachel asked.
Lang made a hushing motion.
"Look," Jacob was saying. "You've simply made a mistake. Since it's only you, why don't you-"
He had answered Lang's question.
Jacob stepped forward. His visitor's reaction was a step backward to keep the space between them. The man motioned menacingly with his weapon. He wasn't going to retreat farther. This was as close to the door as he was going to get.
Something-a slight groan of the floorboards, a puff of air from the opening door-gave Lang away before he had reached his adversary. The man had been trained. Instead of the normal reaction of spinning around and exposing his back to Jacob, he attempted to sidestep before turning.
But not in time.
With his left hand Lang got under the other man's gun arm, shoving it upward as he cupped his chin in his right hand and simultaneously brought up a swift knee to the groin. His opponent grunted with pain and doubled over in time to take a second knee to the face.
Blood from the broken nose made abstract patterns on the papers scattered on the floor.
The two blows had taken sufficient strength from the intruder that Jacob easily wrested the gun from his hand. Before he could bring it to bear, the interloper was out the door, a bloody hand holding his crushed face. Jacob stepped outside and leveled what Lang could now see was a massive weapon.
"Jacob, dear, be more careful where you point that thing." Rachel stood between her husband and the sound of rapidly receding footsteps. "Whatever did you do to that poor man?"
Lang crossed the room and took the pistol from Jacob as he lowered it. "IMI Desert Eagle."
Jacob nodded. "Fifty-caliber Magnum, the one designed in America and developed by the Israeli military. Bit of a cannon, that."
Lang turned the heavy automatic over. Only seven shots in the fifty-caliber version. Short on firepower, too large and heavy for most who simply needed a firearm, but more easily concealed than a carbine with similar hitting force-no amateur's gun. The Desert Eagle's cavernous bore inflicted "magnum flinch" on those not used to its mule kick of a recoil.
"Whoever your visitor was, he was a professional. What did he want?"
"Thanks to you, we never got specific: He just wanted to know where 'it' was."
" 'It'?"
"Don't think I misunderstood. That's what the bloke said, 'it.'"
Rachel crossed the room, taking the heavy automatic from Lang. She carried it into Jacob's office with two fingers in much the same way she might have disposed of a dead rat. "Gentlemen, our dinner reservations won't wait all evening."
The woman was a seasoned intelligence operative's wife. But the look she gave her husband clearly said the interrogation would begin when they were alone.
Once they were all back in the car, Lang's mind went over the last two days. Rather than risk his reservations appearing on an airline's easily hacked computer, he had shown up at the airport and paid cash for the ticket, thereby also avoiding a credit card's all too traceable charge, if guaranteeing a thorough search of him and his single suitcase by zealous airport security.
He would, of course, be on the aircraft's manifest.
The fact that he had been traced to London and followed to Jacob's office meant several things, all unsettling. First, whoever was out to end the alternate-fuel program probably had contacts in the United States. That was hardly surprising in view of the shots fired in Underground and Lewis's murder. Second, this unknown entity was well organized, able to gain information on one side of the Atlantic and use it on the other. He had surmised that if not known it.
The gun he had just held, though, told him something new: This… this unknown was composed of at least some professionals, trained men, as opposed to a band of wild fanatics. To leave such a clue was a surprise. Anonymous groups involved in violence usually took pains to use sanitized equipment, weapons like the Russian AK-47 and its progeny, the U.S. Colt. 45 automatic, or any of several Berettas, firearms of such universal use that they were no longer attributable to any particular location, country, or organization.
Either someone had gotten careless, or whomever he was opposing didn't worry about leaving clues.
He spent most of dinner trying to figure out which.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Middle Temple Inn
London
The Next Morning
Lang sat across Jacob's littered desk from the barrister. They were both sipping hot tea the color of strong coffee as Jacob thumbed through the copies Lang had given him the day before.
"Can't really say when I'll be through translating," Jacob said. "Not a good idea to keep them about the house. Our friend from last night might pay a call. At least here I can hide 'em in the general clutter-like a pebble on the beach."
Lang took a tentative sip from his mug and winced at the bitterness of the brew, only increased by the wedge of lemon Jacob had offered. "Any preliminary ideas?"
"A few. I'd say someone copied a much earlier document-copied it out in verse, like your King James Bible. Like the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, these were likely used in synagogues rather than available to the public at large. They appear to be an effort to reduce Jewish history to the written word sometime after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. This particular lot claims to be a copy of a much earlier chronicle by the scribe
Jereb. Superficially it resembles the Book of Exodus. The operative word here is resembles. The original might even predate Exodus."
"By how much?"
Jacob shrugged as he put his mug down on a stack of legal pleadings. "Possibly from the time of Moses. If I had to guess, I'd say from the little bit of content I can understand without a closer look that someone translated these from another language. It's likely that they were again copied, possibly in the first millennium. It would be helpful if I could see the material itself, judge the ink and writing surface."
"That's not possible."
Jacob picked up his tea and took a long sip. "Pity."
"I mean, I don't have a clue where the copy I used to make those came from, other than Dr. Yadish's cousin in Austria."
Jacob was regarding the contents of his mug. "The tea, I mean. A pity. Time was we got excellent leaf from Ceylon. Now it calls itself by some other name, natives too bleeding busy with some sodding revolution to tend the bushes, and I have to make do with Indian leaf."
Lang hid a smile. Jacob's current Zeitgeist was sometimes limited. "Can you at least give me some idea?"
"What does it matter? India's effing India, not Ceylon."
"The manuscript. Can you give me an idea what it's about?"
Jacob looked mildly surprised that the conversation had gone astray. "Some rot about Moses, powder, perhaps like the lot you told me about. And the Ark of the Covenant. Or so it seems."
Lang forgot the tea. "As in Exodus?"
Jacob shook his head. "Like but not the same. Someone else is telling this particular tale. I was told by those more educated on the subject than I that what you call the Old Testament was probably first reduced to Hebrew sometime during the Babylonian Captivity, 500 b.c. or thereabouts, a collection of Jewish oral history and stories in more ancient languages. What you have is probably one in a series of sequential copies, this one, as I said, much earlier than 500 b.c."
Lang was leaning forward in his chair. "But what you're looking at isn't in the Old Testament?"
Jacob was reaching for a pipe. "Not in your book nor mine. Torah either, I suspect."
"But…?"
Jacob had the leather pouch out, pinching stringy tobacco into the pipe. "Just as you Christians picked four Gospels out of any number-a new one seems to pop up every year or so-I suspect my people did, too. I'd speculate this one didn't… what do you Yanks say? Make the cut. This one didn't make the cut."
Jacob cocked an eyebrow as he puffed the flames of a match into the bowl, well aware that Lang's Southern upbringing frequently made him bridle at being called a Yankee. "So, what do you do now?" he continued. "After last night I wouldn't think you'd want to be about while I work on your manuscript."
Lang hadn't considered that it would take any length of time to translate the papers. "Don't know exactly. By the way, I apologize for exposing Rachel to what might have happened last evening."
Jacob watched a ring of blue smoke shimmer across the desk. "Apologize to me. I'm the one who caught bloody hell for it. Now she thinks I'm somehow back, connected to the lads over at the embassy."
The British headquarters of Mossad.
"You didn't tell her about…?"
Jacob put up a restraining hand. "Tell her you gave me something that turns out to be dangerous enough to get us killed? Not bleeding likely! She'll simmer down, thinking I'm doing my part for the homeland. She knows it's just a favor for a friend, albeit a jolly good friend. Otherwise I'd be takin' my sleep on that bloody awful settee you saw in my parlor. Less a woman knows, less she has to complain about."
That idea, Lang, thought, had damned near gotten him killed.
"Speakin' of favors for friends." Jacob put the pipe down long enough to open a desk drawer and remove a pistol in a belt clip holster. "When you called yesterday, you asked what I could do about gettin' some protection. I guessed right off it wasn't condoms you were lookin' for. I remembered you favored one of these."
Jason took the proffered weapon, a SIG Sauer P226 just like the one in his bedside table at home. "Thanks, Jacob. I'm surprised you could come up with this so quickly."
Jason held up dismissive hands. "I still know a few secrets some lads would just as soon I keep to m'self. Now, it's been lovely chatting you up, but if you'll leave me be I'll get on these papers."
Lang walked back to his hotel, careful to watch for anyone who might be following. He was still unsure of what came next when he checked the telltales on his door and let himself in.
He sat on the bed and picked up the phone after checking his watch. Then he put it down again and left the room. At the concierge's desk in the lobby he exchanged bills for coins before stepping back outside.
It took a while to find a pay phone in St. James. The signature red booths had long ago disappeared into American chain restaurants, to be replaced by simple plastic bubbles, if there at all. The cell phone had made the coin-operated variety an endangered species.
Although almost any call on the planet had been subject to monitoring long before the fact became a political issue, a public-telephone conversation would be buried in unmined data. If they-whoever "they" were-had sufficient sophistication to hack into the FAA's flight plan database to meet h
im in Brussels, they possibly could piggyback the Anglo-American spy system to pull up any calls made from his cell, a number they would surely be watching.
He toyed with the idea of simply going to a post office, a place that always had pay phones, since the British postal system owned the phone company. But it was too crowded and too easy to overhear conversations in the ordinary post office.
Past Picadilly Circus, he spotted what he was looking for and counted out a handful of change. He patiently listened to the hisses and squeaks of a transatlantic call, wondering why the sounds were just the same as when the old Atlantic cable was the sole means of communication.
"Hello?"
At least the quality had improved. The voice on the other end could have come from across the room rather than an ocean.
"Francis! It's your favorite heretic!"
Pause.
"Lang?"
"You don't recognize my voice?"
"Of course I do," the priest snapped. "You're just not among the people I'd expect to be calling at seven in the morning, ante lucem."
"Qui male odit lucem. That's because it's noon here. Surely I didn't wake you up."
"Obviously not, since you called my office, not my cell phone, hopefully for some other purpose than to announce the time of day, wherever you are."
Lang was about to quote Virgil again until he noticed a young cherub-faced and uniformed nanny giving him an odd look over the long handlebars of the pram she was pushing. "It's all right, dearie. I always practice my Latin on the phone."
She retreated at a pace that might have exceeded the baby carriage's safety limits.
"What?" Francis said. "Unis dementia…"
"… Dementes efficit multos," Lang finished. "Insanity is catching. But I didn't call just to chat. I've got some questions about the Bible."
"You apostates always have questions about the Bible. That's why you're infidels," Francis said dryly.
It was an old and good-natured barb.
