Serpent of Moses (A Jack Hawthorne Adventure #2)

by Don Hoesel

  “Do you think things like this happen to normal couples?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said with a laugh that mirrored hers.

  “So where are you now?”

  “Sfax. A coastal city on the other side of the Mediterranean.”

  “And you have the Nehushtan.”

  He knew how Espy would view that. Once again he’d put his life in danger to procure something he thought was valuable. Inadvertently he’d also put the lives of her and her brother in danger, though he didn’t expect her to know that. What he wasn’t prepared for, though, was the somber tone in her voice.

  “There’s a lot going on that you don’t know about,” she said, and then she proceeded to share with him everything that had been done on his behalf. When she’d finished, Jack was dumbfounded.

  “You got Duckey to go to Libya?” was all he could think to say.

  “Jack, he’s in trouble.”

  Jack ran a hand through his hair, considering all that Espy had told him.

  “Have you called his wife?” he asked.

  Espy admitted that she hadn’t.

  “As soon as I get off the phone with you, I’ll call her and see if he’s checked in.” He shook his head and added, “Duckey knows what he’s doing. He’ll get himself out of whatever he’s gotten himself into.”

  He said it because he had to, and Espy understood that, but Jack couldn’t help but feel tremendous guilt that, once again, his actions had caused harm to people he cared about. And in light of what Espy had just shared with him, the staff had lost some of its draw.

  He was about to offer additional encouragement when Espy, a note of panic in her voice, spoke first.

  “Jack, he said my phone was compromised.”

  “He what?”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. With all the excitement I forgot. They’ve probably heard everything.”

  “Who has?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jack blew out a breath. “Okay, I’m going to hang up and call Stephanie. Then I’ll find a way to call your brother’s phone. It’ll be from a different number.”

  Seconds later, the phone was off and Jack was left wondering how a single phone call could turn a man’s world on its head.

  It took three tries before he remembered Romero’s number, and the Venezuelan answered on the first ring.

  “You’ve alternately upset my sister and made her extremely happy, so I am undecided regarding whether I should injure you or hug you when I see you next,” Romero said.

  “I’ve had a few of your hugs,” Jack said, “and I think you could go either way and it wouldn’t matter too much.”

  He knew that if he was in Romero’s presence at that moment, the man would have wrapped him in an embrace that would have squeezed the air from his lungs.

  “It’s good to hear from you, my friend,” Romero said.

  “Same here,” Jack said.

  He paused as someone passed behind him. Jack had convinced the lobby desk clerk of a hotel he wasn’t staying at to let him use the desk phone. He’d told the man that he couldn’t get a dial tone on the phone in his room, and while he felt bad about the lie—which he hoped indicated spiritual growth of some kind—he reasoned that it was for the greater good.

  “I’m in a bad spot here so I have to be quick,” Jack said.

  “Understood,” Romero returned.

  “I spoke with Duckey’s wife and she told me in a roundabout way that an old friend of his at the Company is going to pull him out of Libya.”

  “That’s good news,” Romero said. “Can I take it from his bride’s circumspectness that she believes her phone is also being monitored?”

  “I think that’s a valid assumption.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw the desk clerk growing impatient. He would know the call was long distance, and good customer service only went so far.

  “That’s why I think we need to listen to him and not try to find him ourselves. He’s right—we’d get picked up the minute we got off the plane.”

  “So what do we do in lieu of that?” Romero asked.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” Jack said and he heard Romero snort in response.

  “Esperanza said you won’t leave Tunisia without the staff and that you have brokered some deal to make that happen. And if you do not mind my being frank, I think that cheapens what has been done on your behalf.”

  It wasn’t the comment that struck Jack so much as the man who’d made it. In years past, Romero had accompanied him on many an outing, and while danger hadn’t become an element in Jack’s work until the last few years, the Venezuelan had always possessed a sense of adventure that made him the equal to any challenge. He wondered, as he considered his response, if Romero’s stance indicated that he too was entering a more mature phase.

  The clerk was looking at him again—a more pointed look now. Jack ignored him.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “But even you have to admit that this isn’t just a treasure hunt anymore. I’ve seen men killed for this thing and now we have someone tapping our phones and sending Duckey on the run. Are you going to tell me that you just want to walk away without seeing this through?”

  While pleading his case, he’d turned away from the clerk to avoid seeing the man’s dour expression. But when he turned back, he saw that the look on the Tunisian’s face had changed. He seemed to be hanging on Jack’s every word.

  “Except that you are ready to risk your life for something that is not even whole,” Romero said.

  “What . . . ? How did you know the staff was separated into pieces?”

  “Surely Espy told you about Cyme.”

  Confused, Jack said, “I’m not following. What about Cyme?”

  He heard fumbling on the other side of the line and the next voice he heard was Espy’s.

  “There are two pieces,” she said.

  “I know,” Jack said. “It’s missing part of its tail.”

  “The other piece is in Cyme.”

  Jack paused. “That, I didn’t know,” he finally said.

  “Which is what you get when you decide to travel without a linguist,” she chided.

  “Believe me. If I have the opportunity to make a choice like that again, I’ll think it through a little better. Now, do you want to explain?”

  Espy did, beginning with their discovery of the Gafat text around the symbols and the subsequent discovery of the second destination. By the time she finished, Jack felt thrilled for the discovery and irritated that he hadn’t made it himself.

  “Al-Idrisi was a crafty one,” he said with admiration. “I never would have known about the location of the second piece.” At the clerk’s puzzled look, he put a hand over the phone and said, “Al-Idrisi hid one of the symbols we need in order to find the second part of the staff, using a language that no one’s spoken in hundreds of years. But an associate of mine just so happens to speak practically every language known to man, so she was able to figure it out. Are you with me?”

  The clerk nodded to indicate he was on board, but judging by his expression Jack thought he was just saving face.

  “Good. Try to keep up,” Jack said before turning his attention back to Espy. “So we head to Cyme,” he said, and despite the fact that he thought she shared his enthusiasm, her silence suggested she wasn’t ready to head to Turkey just yet.

  “What about Duckey?” she asked.

  It was a legitimate question—probably the only question she could have asked that stood a chance of derailing the train.

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your brother. There’s no way any of us are getting into Libya—at least not quickly. Yeah, we could probably sneak in across the border, but what would we do after we got there?”

  “I don’t know,” Espy admitted. “But it just doesn’t feel right to look for the second piece of the staff when we don’t know what’s happened to him.”

  Jack didn’t
begrudge her those feelings, because he shared them. Duckey was a close friend, and the thought of anything happening to him because of something Jack had done sickened him. He’d watched friends die before and would give anything to never have something like it happen again. Yet he knew there was nothing he could do to help the man. The CIA had sent help and the U.S. government was in a significantly better position from which to render aid. Too, the thought that kept coming to his mind was that finding the rest of the staff would put an end to all of it.

  He shared this with Espy, the only person in the world who could understand, because she’d lived through so much with him.

  “Alright,” she said after Jack had given her time to consider. “How are you going to get to Turkey? I know you said you’ve worked something out, but they’re not going to let you take a rare artifact out of the country.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. I’ll find some way of getting into Turkey. Why don’t you and your brother go and I’ll call you when I get to Istanbul.”

  He could sense Espy’s hesitation.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll meet you in Istanbul within two days.”

  He knew there was no certainty he could offer her, and Espy was strong enough not to require any. What was becoming clear to Jack—and it was something that should have been clear to him long ago—was that she required him. And he was starting to remember that it was a shared need.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  “For what?” she asked, although she needn’t have.

  “For walking away again.”

  She could have told him that he hadn’t done that—that they were still together these three years later. But it wouldn’t have been the truth and both of them knew it.

  “I love you,” he said, meaning every word.

  “I’ll see you in Istanbul,” she replied quietly and then the line went dead.

  Jack stood holding the phone to his ear for a long while. When he finally came back from where he’d been, he turned to hang up the phone and found the desk clerk waiting with expectation.

  “She said she’d see me in Istanbul,” Jack said.

  He couldn’t tell if that answer satisfied the man. He didn’t even know if it satisfied him.

  He left it at that, offering the clerk a tired smile and walking away.

  When Boufayed walked into the room, he was already in a poor mood, having made no gains in locating the hidden American agent. He’d taken his frustration out on those around him and he could see that knowledge on the face of the technician who turned in his direction.

  He was less familiar with the Al Bayda office than he was with the one in Tripoli, but he could see that the technical analysis unit was almost as advanced as the one in the capital. Even in Tripoli, though, he rarely visited this room, even if he appreciated the information it provided. He knew that the hum of the servers, the clicks of multiple fingers dancing over keyboards, and the playback of recorded conversations were a music of sorts that, when worked over by those with the proper skill set, produced a symphony. Simply put, he had too much to do to spend time observing the accumulation and analysis of raw data—data that would make it to his desk at some point if the men and women studying it determined it was worth his review.

  At present, the data that had come in—that continued to come in—was worth the personal touch.

  The room he entered was sealed off from the rest of the floor, and the entire ten-meter length of the far wall was lined with flat-screen monitors. Below the monitors ran a large table with keyboards spaced evenly along its length. In front of each keyboard sat a technician, wearing headphones and watching the screen in front of them with clinical interest. Some of them looked back as Boufayed entered, but only one gestured for him to approach.

  Boufayed stood behind the technician, watching the dark image on the screen. He could see a bed, and someone beneath the blankets, although it was too dark in the room for Boufayed to tell much more than that. After watching for a time and seeing no movement, not even the rise and fall of a blanket to tell him that the man was breathing, he addressed the technician.

  “Let me hear the call,” he said.

  The technician’s hands flew over the keys and the image on the monitor changed. The room was lighter and he could see a man sitting at a desk near the wall opposite the camera. He could see only the man’s back.

  Freezing the image, the tech handed back his headphones and, once Boufayed was ready, set the scene in motion. Boufayed listened to the entire exchange, though he could only hear one side of the conversation. As much as they’d tried to procure the technology that would allow them to crack the security protocols used on the phones the Americans issued to their agents, they had been unsuccessful. And for calls such as the one he was watching and listening in on, the people who worked in this office were tasked with filling in the part of the conversation that went unheard.

  As Boufayed listened a second time, he tried to forget about what he’d been told by his analyst. But willful ignorance was a difficult skill to master. Still, even with his attempts to prejudice what he’d heard, he found himself agreeing with the analyst’s assessment.

  He returned the headphones to the technician.

  “It’s not much,” the young man said, “but there are a few phrases that make me believe he’s about to try to help someone get out of the country.”

  Boufayed nodded. He’d heard the tells as well. Again, he thought his analyst was correct: an extraction attempt was in the works and he could think of no one who needed that service more than a missing CIA agent.

  What gave him pause, however, was the conversation he’d heard between Esperanza Habilla and a man named Jack. He assumed he was the missing archaeologist who’d been referenced in other calls. Boufayed was still amazed that she’d spoken so freely on a phone that she should have suspected was no longer useful for private conversations. Her slip had been a boon to the Libyan, for it had provided information he would never have been able to get otherwise. It almost convinced him to suspend the hunt for Jim Duckett. He wondered how much more he could hope to learn from the man, and what that information would cost him in resources. More often than not, though, good information was worth considerably more than the cost to obtain it.

  Even so, the decision to use the new information to apprehend Jim Duckett was not an easy one. The man who appeared on the monitor, the picture having switched back to a real-time feed, had cost them a great deal of time and money, which had been spent toward the development of a surveillance system that could track his every move. It wasn’t often that an intelligence agency had the opportunity to monitor the movements of another nation’s agent working in the field. One did not make the decision to burn that resource without good reason.

  What tipped the scales for Boufayed was Agent Robert Ingersoll, whose handlers felt that Jim Duckett was worth the risk to Ingersoll’s painstakingly cultivated placement. If they valued Duckett that highly, how could he not?

  “He will have to make contact with Duckett in order to arrange the extraction,” Boufayed said.

  “Of course, sir,” said the technician, but he was speaking to Boufayed’s retreating back.

  26

  “You have no idea how much I appreciate this, Tom.”

  Tom Fitzpatrick broke into a laugh, which told Duckey that, on the contrary, the man did know how much Duckey appreciated it, and that a recompense of some sort had been factored into the assistance. Once the laughter subsided, he said, “As soon as they get you in, you and I are due for a long talk. Checking someone’s records is one thing, Jim. Using the Company’s resources to smuggle you out of Libya is another thing entirely.”

  “I understand,” Duckey said.

  “You know I’m always willing to help out,” Fitzpatrick said. “But whatever it is you’ve got yourself mixed up in has you asking for more resources than you ever did when working for me. I can’t keep doing this wit
hout someone asking questions.”

  “And I’ll have the answers to each and every one of those questions as soon as I can shake your hand,” Duckey promised.

  “Fair enough.”

  After Duckey ended the call, he turned his attention to the street, waiting for the signal from whomever Fitzpatrick had sent. He wore the headphones he’d picked up in the cab that had stopped at the corner early that morning, and that he’d ridden around the block in once before returning to his room.

  In Duckey’s mind, the operation had already taken too long. In his day, he would have been in and out in less than sixty seconds. He was a firm believer that no amount of planning, checking and rechecking could take the place of rapid deployment and a precision extraction. Still, he knew it wasn’t his game anymore; things had changed and he could only sit back now and let younger men do what they’d been trained to do.

  His hand drifted to the gun on the table—the other item left for him in the cab. It would be untraceable, the serial number filed away. Tom had broken several rules in getting it to him, and Duckey knew he owed his friend for that too.

  Less than two minutes after he’d finished with Fitzpatrick, Duckey saw a white Ford Taurus roll up, parking a few buildings away in a spot near the truck with the flat tire. According to the company name and information on the door panel, the car belonged to a local flower shop. Yet he couldn’t see past the tinted windows to confirm that. That need was removed from him, though, when his phone rang.

  “We’re ready” was the simple message, spoken in perfect English.

  “On my way,” Duckey replied.

  Letting the curtain fall back into place, Duckey rose and headed for the stairs, which he was forced to take at normal speed regardless of how much he wanted to reach the flower-shop car, as every step nearly sent him tripping over his dress. He wondered if the full Muslim wraps were now standard Company procedure or if Tom was just having fun with him. Even if the latter was true, he suspected he deserved it for what he was putting his friend through.