by Don Hoesel
Satisfied, he gathered his clothes, stuffed them into the thrift-store bag, hoisted the bag that had made the trip from the States with him, and exited the restroom. As he walked past the counter, the man who had allowed Duckey the use of the café bathroom did a double take at the man who’d gone in as an American and come out as some indistinguishable ethnicity. Duckey kept his eyes forward and exited onto the street, where he entered the flow of foot traffic and remained there until he reached his next objective.
Entering the cellular store—the same one through which he’d negotiated his escape the previous evening—he purchased two disposable phones, paid to add extra minutes, and paid the added fee to have them activated at the point of sale. Minutes later, he walked out, almost a hundred dinars lighter.
He walked for fifteen minutes, surrounding himself with people whenever possible and keeping his head down when he didn’t have the assistance of a crowd. As he’d given thought to where he should go, he decided that his first order of business was to get out of Khansaa. He thought the Libyans would concentrate their search in that neighborhood, which created an incentive for him to find a hole somewhere they wouldn’t expect—which was why he was headed toward Andulus. As the heart of Al Bayda’s legislative district, with homes that rivaled a decent suburb back in the States, Andulus would have seemed to harbor few places in which an unsavory element such as he could have disappeared. But Duckey had reviewed his map carefully, comparing it against what he remembered from his cab ride into the city, and had decided that it would do just fine.
When he entered the neighborhood, he adjusted his posture, straightening his back and raising his head. If someone belonged in a good neighborhood such as this one, they acted like it. Using the same techniques in Andulus that he’d used in Khansaa to maintain his anonymity wasn’t an option.
Picking a road that took him along the eastern edge of the district, Duckey walked with purpose but still avoided eye contact with anyone he passed. After several minutes, he entered a part of the neighborhood that looked a lot like the section of Khansaa where he’d run into trouble, and he began to search for a place into which he could disappear. He found it two blocks farther down, in the form of a hotel that looked much like the one Duckey had occupied the night before. Entering, he paid for a room for one night, appreciating that the man who took his money and gave him the key didn’t look up, not even once.
His room was on the second floor. Duckey ascended the stairs, slipped the key into the lock, and retreated into his temporary sanctuary. After he closed the door and threw the dead bolt, he gave the room a once-over. While it left a lot to be desired, he thought it would do.
He tossed his bags onto the bed, then went to the window and looked down on the street but didn’t spot anything worrisome. Leaving the window, he checked the entire room as a precaution, despite that there was no way anyone would have known he’d selected this hotel.
Satisfied, Duckey pulled one of the phones from his pocket and dialed one of the numbers he’d copied from the phone he discarded. Tom kept the number unlisted, which meant he would answer even if he didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Tom, it’s Jim,” Duckey said.
“Where are you and what do you need?” Tom asked.
“I take it you heard from Stephanie?”
“Probably thirty seconds after she hung up with you.”
“How is she?”
“How do you think she is? She’s scared and angry. And for your sake, I hope she focuses on the scared part when she sees you.”
Despite the circumstances, Duckey couldn’t help but smile, the short conversation already making him feel better about his prospects.
“Tell me what’s going on,” his old boss said, who was still the CIA unit chief.
After a long sigh, Duckey did just that, filling in as many of the details as he could. Throughout the telling, Tom Fitzpatrick remained silent, listening. When Duckey finished, the other man allowed the silence to stretch out as he considered what his former agent had told him. When he broke that silence, he did so with the familiar manner Duckey remembered from the old days.
“I assume you’ve found a spot where you can hole up?” Fitzpatrick asked.
“I have,” Duckey affirmed. “Cash only. Disposable phone. Regional clothing.”
Fitzpatrick grunted his approval. “I don’t have anyone in the area. Maybe one local guy, but no one I’d trust with an extraction. How long do you think you’re good for?”
“I’m good for however long you need me to be.”
“Alright, because I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to arrange everything.”
“Understood.” Even though Duckey’s situation was on the precarious side, he felt a sense of ease come over him.
“Jim,” Fitzpatrick said, and it was clear by the tone that he didn’t share Duckey’s feeling that this was just a walk in the park, “Just so you know, I had our side check the records. Customs in Tripoli has no record you went through.”
While the news served to dampen Duckey’s mood, he couldn’t say that it surprised him. The only reason they wouldn’t have a record of him entering the country was because they didn’t expect him to leave.
“Thanks, Tom,” he said.
“I’ll be in touch,” Fitzpatrick said and then he was gone.
Duckey held the phone to his ear for several seconds after the call ended. When he finally lowered it, he set it on the nightstand, retrieved the TV remote, and settled in to wait for his next call.
It had happened while Jack was outside, enjoying a walk through the quiet community. Marwen had left again, giving Jack the run of the place and assuring the American he could walk the grounds secure in the safety of the small hamlet. It was early afternoon and he’d walked down to the street and then across it where the sloping ground gave him a postcard-worthy view of the ancient city. How long he stood there he couldn’t have said, but he knew that at some point the tension he’d been feeling eased. He even forgot that there were eyes watching him, ostensibly for his safety. Nonetheless, it was disconcerting.
He watched the unfolding of life in the city, his vantage point giving him the metaphorical historian’s view, as if he could see its past and its future along with the present. That was one of the chief reasons he spent so much time in this part of the world, from northern Africa to the Middle East and on through some of the ancient places in Europe. It was to feel a connection to a history that eluded him, even as he uncovered many of its secrets. Looking out on a city like Medenine, he couldn’t help but wonder that civilization had run through its paces in this spot for thousands of years. When Christ walked the earth, the city below him was thriving.
Reminding himself of that helped put things in perspective. It allowed him to think about the treasures he found, the artifacts he discovered as they would have been in the times that saw them created or used. Thinking of the Nehushtan not as a mystical staff hidden in a north African cave but as an icon of hope for a beleaguered people was sobering. He could imagine the hasty crafting of it, and he admired the beauty of it more because of the attention to detail that went into it—despite the urgency of its need. And he could picture the scene of its only other biblical reference: its destruction at the hands of a king intent on appeasing God, who had turned his back on the nation.
Jack frowned, remembering that that part wasn’t true. The Nehushtan hadn’t been destroyed; he had proof of that in the house behind him. And that made for a tricky question. As a believer, he’d come to accept that large portions of the Bible he had once thought of as fables were in fact the accurate account of historical events. His own experience was sufficient to make that case. However, he didn’t know where he came down on the question of the Bible’s complete accuracy. He’d read enough of it to have his doubts about what Espy had called inerrancy, which Jack thought was just a religious label that meant the whole thing had been thoroughly fact-checked by the king of al
l editors.
From what little Jack had ascertained in researching the matter, he’d come to the conclusion that most theologians supported inerrancy for the principal reason that a failure to do so raised a number of difficult questions. Chief among them was that if the Bible wasn’t accurate in every detail, how could the reader be tasked with identifying what was true and what was not? It was a question well beyond Jack’s ability to answer.
To Jack, it seemed that truth was in how one looked at something—that perhaps approaching something in the Bible from a different point of view provided one with something that was true in one sense, yet perhaps not entirely accurate from a more rigid interpretation.
He had pondered all of this while city life progressed below him, and he had just decided to head back up to the house when something that had been nagging at his mind for a while suddenly swam up to the surface. When he latched onto it, he broke into as much of a run as his sore knee would allow.
Reaching the house, he burst through the door and found the Nehushtan in the main living area, once again leaning against a corner, as seemed to be its lot since Jack had liberated it from the cave. As he had used the original cloths to wrap a broomstick, he removed the bed sheet that now protected the artifact. He held it up to the light, turning it around so that the eyes faced away, so he could see the back of the serpent.
When he saw what he was looking for, he broke into a grin.
“It’s all a matter of one’s perspective,” he said to himself.
Releasing a tired but happy sigh, he set the staff back in its corner and went to gather up his belongings.
25
Jack could have made the call from Marwen’s home, but his presence had already put the man in enough danger, regardless of the Tunisian’s protests to the contrary. So he’d borrowed a car and driven to Sfax, into a city center of clean-lined white buildings and stone streets that made much of the city look like an angled chessboard.
As he drove, Jack had the feeling of being in any coastal city on the other side of the Mediterranean, with the palm trees, open layout, and the lights that came on outside the restaurants, clubs, and shops that made up the city’s nightlife. It didn’t take him long to find a place that looked as good as any in which to pull over.
One of the benefits of making a call like the one he was about to attempt while in a populated area was that if it didn’t go as well as he hoped, he had some time to find a place to hide. Too, he assumed that the people whose work he witnessed in the decimated village just two scant days ago would be less inclined to conduct the same sort of operation in a thriving metropolis.
With the car parked, Jack exited and indulged in a long stretch before pulling Templeton’s phone from his pocket. Neither his nor the Englishman’s phones had been switched on since the moment Templeton determined that the Israelis were tracking them, and he knew that pressing the power button was a gamble now.
He looked at the phone for a few seconds as people walked by, singles and groups of various ages and ethnicities. Then he shrugged and turned the thing on. He went to the menu and, while there was no way to tie a listed number to Templeton’s former employers, he guessed that the number called most over the last several weeks would be the one.
It rang twice before it was picked up.
“This must be Dr. Hawthorne,” a voice on the other end said.
Jack was surprised at that but then supposed he shouldn’t have been. The Israelis might well have known that the pair was no longer traveling together and that Jack had taken the man’s phone.
“And you are?”
“Someone who wants what you found in the cave” was the answer. Jack didn’t know an Israeli accent from a Jordanian one, but he guessed the former.
“And yet you’ve not once asked nicely,” Jack said. “It’s all angry Egyptian giants and covert teams.”
There was a pause from the other end.
“We acknowledge that things have gotten a bit out of hand,” the Israeli said. “But the quickest way to end all this unpleasantness is to bring us the staff.”
“You’ll forgive me for not being as assured by that as I might be,” Jack said.
He was enjoying himself, despite the fact that he was ticking off someone who worked for a government that had shown no qualms about killing those that got in their way. But when the Israeli responded, his voice didn’t harbor any animosity.
“You must understand, Dr. Hawthorne, that when we send our people in to retrieve something important to us, it can be exceptionally dangerous. We have lost a number of men and women.”
That might have been the one thing he could have said that would make Jack feel anything other than cool resolve.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And so when we send in other people to do something we are not able to do, and when the ones we send appear to betray us, there can be a heavy-handed response.”
Jack wasn’t sure he bought that, but in the end he didn’t suppose it mattered. “I want to make a deal.”
“What sort of deal?”
“A trade. The Nehushtan for my life and the lives of my friends.”
Jack was sure that this representative of the Israeli government, or at least a faction within that government, had been expecting such an offer, which made the long pause before his replying seem contrived.
“Agreed. Tell me where you are and I will send someone to you.”
Jack was smiling before the man finished. “Do you read the Torah?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know that Hezekiah was to have destroyed the Nehushtan.”
“Obviously that did not happen.”
As Jack talked, the sea of people passing in front of him had increased.
“I’m telling you that it did happen,” he said. “Just not in the way we’re made to think when we read the story. We have this vision of him destroying it completely—burning the staff, melting down the serpent. But what if the word destroy meant something else?”
“What are you getting at, Dr. Hawthorne?”
“The Nehushtan is in two pieces. I have one of those pieces.” He could hear the man’s breathing through the phone—the sound of exasperation.
“Why should I believe you?”
Jack had been expecting that question. “Give me a minute.” Pulling the phone away from his ear, he opened the car door and removed just enough of the bed sheet to see the tail. He snapped a photo and sent the image along. “You’ll be getting a picture soon. I want you to notice the tail.”
He waited for what seemed a long while for the Israeli to speak.
“I see it,” the man said.
“Good. Then you’ll notice the very end—the way it looks like there’s something missing?”
After several seconds, his adversary said, “I will send you a team. They will support you as you search for the missing piece.”
“That’s not how this is going to work,” Jack said. “Instead, I’m going to the airport tomorrow, where there will be a voucher waiting for me and an exemption to transport antiquities. I’ll use that voucher to fly wherever I want. I’ll find the missing piece and then I’ll turn both pieces over to you. After which we’ll part ways and never see each other again.”
He understood that he didn’t hold many cards. If the Israelis really wanted the staff, and if they were unwilling to trust him, they could come for him, claim the artifact, and then expend whatever resources were necessary in order to find the missing piece. After all, Jack was confident he could find it if given the time and resources. He had to think a well-funded government research unit could do the same.
“And if we refuse?”
“Then I destroy it,” Jack said.
“You would not do that,” the Israeli replied, but Jack heard the question in the statement.
“If it’s a choice between a biblical artifact and the lives of my friends, I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
He ended the call wi
thout waiting for a response. Then, for good measure, he powered the phone down.
He stood on the busy street, pondering what he’d just done. He was taking a huge chance, but most end games were not without risk. The real risk would come if he did find the second piece, and if he failed to turn the pieces over to the Israelis. They had killed people just to add something to their collection. As far as he was concerned, that made them unworthy to have it. Making the deal bought him a ticket out of the country. More important, it got him someplace in the Western world, where he stood a chance of finding a way out of the mess he was in—and perhaps keeping the artifact in the process.
With that in mind, he got back into the car, relocating so that if they had tracked Templeton’s phone, he wouldn’t be there when they arrived. After that, he had another call to make, a call he’d wanted to make for days.
“Hello?” said the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard in his life, with an understandably hesitant inflection.
“Have you missed me?” Jack asked.
Perhaps two seconds passed before it clicked for Esperanza, and Jack had to pull the phone away from his ear to survive the scream.
“It’s nice to talk to you too,” he said.
And then Espy had the floor, talking in that rapid-fire way that only she could do, regardless of the language. Jack couldn’t follow all of it but understood a number of the key words, as well as the general sentiment.
“Wait a minute,” he said when she took a breath. “One question at a time.”
Jack spent the next couple of minutes sharing the events of the last week in broad strokes with Espy, and while Jack’s story required more than a little suspension of disbelief, the benefit of the things they’d been through over the years was that there were few things that could happen to either of them that the other wouldn’t in the end believe.
When he’d finished, Espy chuckled. For Jack, hearing her laughter through the phone was the best thing to happen to him in a long time. And as he extended that thought, he realized that this also included the discovery of the staff. It was a revelation that surprised and pleased him at the same time.
