The Prophet Conspiracy

by Bowen Greenwood

  The closest place of any interest was the Dead Sea, an hour’s drive away. Most of the workers went there on their weekends. Weekdays, on the other hand, left little energy for play. Long hours of manual labor in merciless heat left everyone so exhausted they usually went right to sleep at the end of the day.

  Few trailers had anything in the line of creature comforts. His own was no different. He had a bed, a couple of chairs, and a desk. On the desk sat his treasure and his nemesis.

  He stared at the quarter-inch thick stack of letter-sized white paper. It had his name and title on the top. It was an academic theory about the history of Islam and Jerusalem.

  He picked it up and opened it as if to read it, then threw it back down. He had no need to read the words. Every last one of them was committed to memory. He used to amuse his students with his photographic memory. He would start the first class or two of a semester by describing for them things he had only seen for a few seconds.

  Those were happier days, before this paper had changed his life.

  It had sailed through peer review and had been accepted for publication under his name. But he hadn’t written it.

  Only two human beings knew that. One of them had lost her career over it. The second was supposed to make the archaeological find of the century. But that looked less and less likely. Instead, it now appeared both of them would lose their careers over it.

  In a scorched desert under an oppressive heavy sun, in this place at the crossroads of antiquity, it was easy to believe his failure was some kind of divine justice – justice for what he had done.

  He remembered the moment well. A conference was coming up, and he had already submitted the paper he would present. It was about surrounding tribes adopting ancient Hebrew customs without actual conversion. It was boring, and he knew it would not be accepted by any major peer-reviewed journal for publication.

  But then… the other paper came into his possession. The one he now held in his hands. It was exciting. It offered real possibilities for a dig that would get funded.

  And the conference organizer – the head of the Archaeology department at his own university – had once let Kendrick see him enter his pin to the alarm system in the department offices.

  His old trick with the photographic memory made everything else easy.

  Kendrick snuck in, replaced his old paper with the new one, and borrowed the man’s receiving stamp. He marked the new paper with the same receipted date his first paper had.

  With that moment of deception, his entire career changed course.

  Now, baking in the desert sun, Kendrick threw the paper down. It had seemed worth the risk. It was worth the risk. The theory espoused in that paper pointed at one of the greatest finds in history. What if there really was evidence of Muhammad’s night journey? It would reshape the politics of the Middle East. It might set off a war but win or lose, it would change the world.

  It would make the archaeologist who unearthed it into a hero; a successful hero whose dig proposals always received grant funding.

  But for it to happen, he would have to actually make the find, not just publish the theory. And now he was digging in the wrong place.

  At first, he had gone to the Israeli government about funding. Even though they didn’t have a budget for archeology, he thought maybe they would make an exception for this. It would be directly relevant to their national security, which explained why, after shuffling through several bureaucratic departments, he eventually found himself interviewing with the Israeli Security Agency. They actually did seem interested in funding his dig but some kind of internal politics had prevented it from happening.

  Finally, he got funding from a non-governmental organization (NGO) with ties to the UN called the Fund for Middle East Harmony. They had accepted his grant proposal at full budget, which delighted Kendrick. In exchange, though, the NGO had insisted on this site in the Southern Negev being the first one excavated.

  It didn’t seem like the most likely place to Kendrick. If the Muslims believed Muhammad had come to Jerusalem, why not look for the evidence in Jerusalem? But no one else offered him grant funding. He had gone so long in his stagnant career without a single proposal getting funded. When he finally had something worthy of attention, he still found it impossible to get funding. And when he finally met one funder – a very generous funder – he took it. Wrong place or not, every academic knew funding beat no funding. So he had accepted the proposal to dig in the Negev and decided to sort the problem out later.

  Well, later had come and gone, and still Kendrick wandered the Negev digging for nothing. He was a scholar; analyzing his situation came naturally to him. He stole — plagiarized — someone else’s work. He had chosen to do something hurtful for personal gain.

  The problem before him now? How to actually get the personal gain for which he sold his integrity.

  CHAPTER 5

  For a long time, Siobhan simply wandered the Jewish market. She understood she was safe and free because she had disappeared into the crowd, so she felt reluctance to leave it. Her red hair stood out slightly, but the ball cap helped cover that. She let the flow of traffic carry her down the dimly-lit streets, just trying to make the day’s events fit into her head.

  Around her, a river of conversation swirled into uncountable eddies and currents. She remembered enough college Hebrew to understand occasional words, or even a sentence here and there, but not much. She felt completely immersed.

  She had seen two people murdered. She couldn’t get the archeologist’s bespectacled face out of her mind. Killed right in front of her, he no longer existed on the earth now.

  In this city of faith, imagining the essence of him carrying on somewhere came easily. Either Heaven or Hell - but she didn’t really know how that worked, or which one was real, or which he would have wanted to go to anyway.

  Scandalous thoughts for a church secretary.

  Several years ago, Siobhan McLane had been in earnestly studying for a master’s degree in archeology. As a young girl, she had loved the original Tomb Raider video games when they had come out, and she grew up dreaming of herself in the heroine’s role discovering artifacts of mysterious power buried under the sands of time. Of course, she learned the foolishness of hoping to find supernatural relics of Atlantis long before she attended her first freshman lecture; however, the fascination lasted, and she had looked forward to a career on archaeological digs right up until the moment it all had come to an end.

  She wrote a paper her second year proposing several possible locations in Jerusalem where it might be possible to unearth physical evidence of whether Muhammad truly visited the city. The idea lay near the heart of what Muslims believed about their prophet: he had been supernaturally transported to Jerusalem during a miraculous night journey that also carried him to paradise.

  Her theory had been groundbreaking. Groundbreaking enough that an unscrupulous professor stole it from her and had delivered a lecture advocating her theory. The idea and the evidence for it were way too academically sound to have come from a mere master’s candidate or so the man claimed. His colleagues took him at his word.

  Siobhan found herself expelled from the degree program for “stealing” her own idea. Allegedly, she had plagiarized her professor’s paper on the subject instead of the other way around. And just like that, she was out on the streets with no degree, no workable path to the career of her dreams, and not many prospects for any kind of career at all. With an official charge of plagiarism on her academic record, schools weren’t eager to have her as a student. When they did, there were no scholarship committees interested in funding her anymore. Even finding a job was hard when every background check revealed the plagiarism charge.

  She fought the accusation every step of the way. She tried submitting all the “date created” and “date modified” records from her computer as evidence in her favor. But somehow or other the paper had been stamped as received by an archeology conference two weeks before
she had actually finished it. That evidence, supposedly from a neutral party, outweighed hers with the Dean.

  The experience changed her. It changed her outlook on life. She had started out eager for discovery and fascinated by history. Now, Siobhan kept the official expulsion letter from the Dean’s office. Meticulously, she had folded it and refolded it until she had it down to the size of a business card. Then she had stored it in a metal business card holder her parents had gifted to her when she had started grad school.

  That case and letter now resided in her back pocket. It was a reminder every time she sat down: she intended to prove them wrong.

  While she’d been moping about and entertaining angry daydreams of Professor Kendrick begging her for forgiveness, a local pastor had offered her a job. Church secretary for the small-town congregation didn’t pay much, but it beat the pants off the zero dollars a month she had been earning. The pastor shrugged at the allegations against her and never even asked her if she really did what the university said she did. The only mention of it came when Siobhan brought it up.

  She remembered the moment well. She had told her boss one day, “Someday, I’ll be back in archeology. Someday, I’ll prove him wrong. Someday, I’ll make him admit it was my idea.”

  Her new employer had smiled, clapped her on the shoulder, and said, “I absolutely believe you’ll be back in archeology someday, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you to think about reaching out to him, rather than getting back at him.”

  She never mentioned Kendrick at work.

  Slowly, she had adapted to the narrower horizons of her new life. Unfortunately, the tiny little community’s paychecks barely kept her afloat, with nothing left over to get her life back on track.

  When, a couple years later, the church organized a group tour to Israel, and earned a free seat from the tour company for getting so many paying guests, the elders of the church had voted to give the seat to Siobhan to make up for the meager wage they were paying her, and the young woman had saved every paycheck she could from the moment she had heard about it to pay for one extra day in the Holy Land and the chance to be part of the Dig For A Day program.

  She had carefully sorted through the locations of archaeological digs going on in Israel and had come across one that closely matched one of the locations she had put forward in her paper. She had gone with the desperate hope she could turn one day on a volunteer program into a rebuttal.

  And it had worked! She really did find something. She really did make a discovery. The lead archaeologist on the dig had said it was historic.

  But it had all gone so horribly, terribly wrong. Two people were dead and, somehow, the army wanted to arrest her for it.

  Instead of proving her abilities as an archaeologist and balancing out, if not erasing, the black mark on her record, she was pursued by men with guns.

  Worst of all, she didn’t even have anyone she could ask for help. The pastor she worked for and all the church people on her trip had already gone home. The only two human beings anywhere in Israel she knew at all were the tour guide who had shown them around the country and Professor Kendrick.

  The tour guide she would love to see again. He was a smart man who knew her subject as well as she did. More, he recognized her background and treated her as a peer. And it didn’t hurt that his eyes were dark and sad, his build lean and muscular, and his smile eager and bright.

  But she didn’t know where to find him.

  She did know where to find Kendrick. He had come to Israel years before her, but he was doing a terrible job of it. He worked at a dig site far from Jerusalem in the southern Negev desert. True, there was ancient mosque crumbled into dust there, but there was no less-likely site for Mohammed's night journey. It just proved he never had any real understanding of the idea he had stolen.

  But Siobhan didn’t think she could get from Jerusalem to the desert. She could read a map, of course. It was a two-hour drive. However, she barely scraped by financially even before this trip, let alone after a week of being a tourist. Even if she had any experience with renting a car in a foreign country, she had no money to do it.

  She put all of her hope in what seemed like a much simpler plan. Tomorrow afternoon, an El Al 747 would carry her back to America. No more crazy archaeologist. No more men with guns. Safety. Security. Home.

  The idea of getting back to the U.S. looked like her one and only way out, and Siobhan couldn’t wait.

  But as the crowd in the Jewish market thinned out and the sun drew near the horizon, Siobhan had a scary revelation. Originally, this place had offered safety because of the overwhelming, bewildering crowd.

  When the sun went below the horizon, all the observant Jews would leave to go home and honor the Sabbath. She would be the very last person here. That would not be quite so safe. She began walking toward her hotel, thinking longingly of that secure, comfortable space.

  CHAPTER 6

  Some of them wore long beards. Others were clean shaven. Some of them had the dark hair and brown eyes common to the region. Others had hair entirely of gray or white. The whiter the hair, the more likely the man was to be missing a finger. Or five.

  They were gathered around a table in a private home. There were about ten of them. Every time they met like this, they risked death. If the Shin Bet — Israel’s internal security service — got any wind of the meeting, a 500-pound bomb would drop through the roof before any of them knew it.

  The leadership of Hamas would be eliminated in a single strike.

  But the meeting justified the risk and so far no bomb had come through the roof.

  Haaris Toma stood at the front of the group. He had black hair, brown eyes, the powerful build of a man who used his muscles for a living, and a jagged scar under his left eye where an Israeli bayonet once came too close for comfort.

  An old man with one eye and a white beard at the far end of the table said, “You speak loudly about the faith, Toma. But is it in your heart? This task is too important for someone who believes with his mouth only.”

  “I submit to having my faith questioned because I honor my elders. From anyone less respected, my reply would be more violent. But yes. I believe in my heart. I love the Prophet too much to let this be publicized.”

  The old man nodded.

  “We assigned you to the dig because you have experience killing, and you did it. But not well enough.”

  Anger flashed across Toma’s face, but it never reached his lips.

  “She will die and so will her photograph.”

  “And the ruin itself? It is worse than the American girl and her picture. I think we should destroy it first, then her. If you can find a way to do it without any of our people having to see this heresy, so much the better. As I said earlier, this is not a mission for anyone whose faith is weak.”

  “I disagree,” Toma replied. “The girl might do anything. For all we know, she might already be uploading the picture to social media. I have a plan that will seal the ruins off. No one will know. No one will get in there to see. But the girl? We can only assume Allah favors our cause if she has not already shared the photograph. She should die first.”

  The old man shrugged.

  “As you say. But whatever you do, it is better if fewer of our own men see this. It is a very great heresy. It might weaken the faith of the brothers. I want no Muslim to see that inscription.”

  Toma replied, “My plan can, indeed, keep most of our own people out of it. You will not be disappointed.”

  “Do you plan to make a bomb to destroy it yourself then?”

  Toma shook his head.

  “Oh no. I lack that skill. My idea is much, much more entertaining. When you see how I get the bomb, you will laugh.”

  Once again, the elder shrugged.

  “Just do not fail. Desecration like this cannot be tolerated.”

  “If the inscription says what our source thinks it says, it is a trick of the devil. It will not come to light. I will not fa
il.”

  **********

  Thoughts of escaping across the ocean paraded through her head as she walked back to the hotel. She remembered Ben Gurion Airport as being no different from most American airports except for the painfully long customs line. She remembered the transatlantic flight as long, uncomfortable, and impossible-to-fall-asleep-during; however, at the end of it waited her old job, her nice safe front desk in a small town church, her same kindly old boss with his sage advice, and her basement apartment in her mother’s home.

  It felt wrong to leave the country since she witnessed a murder. It seemed like she should be telling the authorities what she had seen, but the authorities seemed to be in league with the killer, and she wasn’t sure how to safely tell them anything.

  Under those circumstances, what was a better solution than going home?

  One last night in Jerusalem, and then the adventure would be at an end. She’d always have the memory of how it felt to unearth something of real archaeological importance. The horror that had followed tainted it, true. But those first moments of seeing the writing and being hearing it called a historic find… those recollections would always tell her she could have been good at archeology.

  What did it say? What was inscribed on that wall? She’d probably never know but at least she knew how it felt to see something like that for the first time.

  The hotel’s white exterior rose ten stories into the air. Tourist busses usually clogged the driveway, but now it was clear except for a single black SUV with tinted windows. Friday evening, she figured, must mean a reduction in tourist traffic. Gift shops lined the path up to the lobby, and Siobhan eyed the expensive clothing and jewelry displayed there.

  Arriving at the last place she’d felt safe felt like seeing a drinking fountain after a long hot day of walking through desert climates. She took her hat off and pulled the hair band out of her pony tail. She took a deep breath and smiled.

  Inside, marble floors stretched out to a much greater space than one might expect from the outside, with arches opening into paths that led to the dining room, to the bar, to the elevators, or to more gift shops. Two young men with the deep olive skin common to people who lived in this region manned the front desk, answering questions from an irate American tourist about charges to his room.