A man in a dark suit sat in one of the guest chairs scattered around the lobby. He read a newspaper and casually turned the page.
To Siobhan’s left, another man in professional clothes leaned against the lobby wall. He had a pair of sunglasses tucked into the pocket of his suit coat. His short dark hair lay tight against his skull like a soldier. Casually, he lifted his arm to glance at his watch.
A woman in a solid navy pantsuit emerged from the arch that led to the dining room, smiling broadly and walking toward Siobhan. Her hair, lighter than usual for the area, bounced slightly in a short bob. She looked almost like one of the hotel staff walking up for a greeting and an offer to upgrade her room.
“Miss McLane?”
Siobhan backed up a step. She had no idea who this woman was and although she looked like she might be from the hotel, none of the staff had gone out of their way to greet her by name before. The day’s events had made her paranoid.
The woman held out a black leather wallet, letting it drop open to display a badge and an ID card with her picture on it.
“I’m with Shin Bet, Ms. McLane. We need to talk to you about your experience at the dig today.”
“What’s Shin Bet?” Siobhan replied. The woman asking her about the dig made it feel like maybe she could finally talk to the authorities about it. But, still, her experience with trying to run to soldiers earlier had made her paranoid.
The other two men in suits moved from their positions to stand behind Siobhan to her left and right, close enough to be protective but far enough to avoid making her feel hemmed in.
The woman in front of her said, “We’re the internal security agency of Israel’s government. Like the FBI in America. As you know, a major crime was committed today. We’re working to arrest the perpetrators, but we really need to hear your account of what happened in order to make an arrest.”
Now this was how interacting with the government was supposed to go. Siobhan breathed a sigh of relief and said, “I’m so glad to finally hear from you.”
“We’re glad to talk to you, too, Ms. McLane. Please, come with us. We have a car waiting outside.”
Siobhan nodded gratefully and followed as the woman in gray led the way outside. The two men followed.
“Siobhan!”
A familiar and delightful voice called her name. Cameron Dorn, her old tour guide, beamed her a broad smile as he walked up, waving.
He wore cargo pants, hiking boots, and a lightweight shirt with many pockets. A camouflage fitted baseball cap covered his curly dark hair, and five o-clock stubble decorated the scar on his chin. However baggy and pocket-covered his shirt, it failed at concealing the broad, muscular chest of a man who knew his way around a bench press. His rolled up sleeves revealed the strength in his forearms.
She felt better about her day with just one look at him.
His eyes made contact with hers, and she felt the heat of her face flushing. He held the eye contact long enough Siobhan found it hard to think about anything else.
She stopped in her tracks, bringing the procession of government agents to a halt.
“Cam!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad to see you again. What are you doing at my hotel? That’s an amazing coincidence. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”
At once, Siobhan regretted the “afraid I’d never see you again” bit. Too much. She was never going to see him again, after all. Not once she got on the plane to America.
She discovered her right hand toying with her hair, entirely of its own volition apparently. She made it move back down to her side.
“Not much of a coincidence, Siobhan. This is the biggest tourist hotel in the country. Since I became a guide, it’s halfway to being my office. I’m here four times a week. I’ve got a new group from a college in America staying here tonight. I took them out to the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock today, just like I did for all of you. Why are you still here? Your group left two days ago.”
He got close enough to shake her hand, and Siobhan enjoyed the feel of his big, strong grip.
She smiled at him and said, “I extended my stay for a couple days so I could try this ‘Dig For A Day’ program…”
Before she could enjoy the moment too much, one of the agents said, “Miss McLane, we really need to get going.”
“Cam, I’m sorry. I have to go with these people from Shin Bet. I… I wish I could tell you everything that happened today…”
“The Shin Bet?” He paused, and looked at the people around her. “Um, Siobhan, I don’t think…”
“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through today,” she said.
One of the government agents nudged her shoulder hard enough to move her toward the door.
“Miss McLane, we need to move.”
They hurried her forward. She looked over her shoulder to wave at Cam and called out, “I hope I see you again!”
Once outside, one man entered the driver’s seat of the SUV. They urged Siobhan into the back seat. Then the other man and the woman went through either rear door, nestling the American woman uncomfortably between them.
They pulled away from the curb.
The moment they did, the woman drew a pistol out of her blazer and aimed it straight at Siobhan’s face.
At the same time, the man on the other side of her slapped handcuffs around her wrists and locked them into place.
CHAPTER 7
In the hotel lobby, Cameron paused. A disjointed parade of memories and thoughts flashed through his head in seconds as he worried his lower lip with his teeth.
Siobhan. Siobhan. When she’d been in his last tour group, he’d struggled to be professional around her. As a single man, her beauty pulled at him powerfully. Simple human nature raised obstacles to remaining aloof. When one threw in her clear passion for the history of this place, and her knowledge of subjects dear to his own heart, the problem only grew worse.
His old mentor Ibrahim would have told him to never fool around with someone in his tour group. However, keeping that advice had been hard when he was leading Siobhan and her church group around Jerusalem.
Of course, there was no future in it. None. She was very attractive, but she was off limits. It was one thing to tell himself that, though. It was quite another to walk it out when the woman in question had so bright a smile, eyes that always seemed on the verge of winking at him, and who radiated beauty from her head to her wool socks and Columbia hiking boots.
He came to Israel because being Jewish meant something to him. A wife who shared that meant just as much to him. Even if she weren’t heading back to the States, she still wasn’t a good candidate for him to pursue.
Since coming to Israel, this problem had mostly gone away. But now it was back full force. It was just hard – blazingly hard – to be a single man and walk away from a woman who was smart, attractive, and interested in him.
Siobhan was no longer his client. He no longer had an entire tour group deserving of his attention and paying special attention to her was no longer a cause for feeling guilty. But she didn’t share his history and culture.
Right now, there was a much bigger issue. She had said she was going somewhere with Shin Bet agents. Those words were like open flood gates to Cam’s memory, but he forced himself to think about the present instead of the past.
Supposedly, this American tourist was going off with Shin Bet agents. Why? What could it mean? But whatever else might be going on in Siobhan’s life, Cam knew one thing for a fact:
Those people were not with the Shin Bet.
Ibrahim al Aziz had been his teacher when Cam was learning how to be a tour guide. The man taught him many things about the history of his adopted country, the politics of the region, and more. But foremost in Cameron’s mind that moment was Ibrahim’s simple advice about leading a group of people.
“They’re your charges. Take responsibility for them. Their safety affects your honor. Show them, teach them, have fun with them, but above all keep the
m safe.”
Ibrahim would want him to call the authorities and report his concerns, but there he couldn’t follow his mentor’s advice.
Never mind how much it would hurt to have to talk to Shin Bet Agents again. The bigger problem was he was right here, while it would take them at least ten minutes to get here.
Cam dialed the Jerusalem district’s number from memory. He told them the name of the hotel, a basic description of Siobhan and the pretenders, and then he ignored the requests for his name and the requests that he remain on the scene until agents could be dispatched.
He darted out the door of the hotel to follow them.
**********
In a dimly lit room, a long row of men and women sat at small desks. Pressed close together, each of them wore a large pair of headphones covering their ears, and each held his or her hands hovering over a computer keyboard. They didn’t speak to one another. Although each of them, from time to time, looked away from their computer monitors to stare at the wall, it never lasted long.
One of them burst into furious typing. He rattled the keyboard in front of him like a jackhammer, and words raced across the screen. The moment the typing began, a light went on over his station.
Eli Segal walked toward that station.
Extra pounds pushed against the boundaries of his belt, and the last few strands of his hair fought a losing rearguard action against baldness. Eli walked with his back straight and his eyes forward. It was a new habit. He had always walked with a stoop, until he came here.
He read over the other man’s shoulder — the one who was typing. The words on the screen were in a large-enough font for him to read.
“…amazing… turn … stupid … shin …double … great!”
It was only a few words because frequency switching radios made it hard to overhear entire conversations.
Segal worked in the Division for Countering Terrorism at the Shin Bet. He was the supervisor of one of the wiretapping desks — the one responsible for the Arab quarter in Jerusalem.
Across Israel, satellites, balloons, aircraft, towers, and more were dedicated to overhearing the conversations of terrorists and stopping them before they could strike. Those conversations came here, to this room, or one of many others like it. Clerks listened and flagged items of interest. When they flagged something, it was the supervisor’s job to determine who should be alerted.
“What do you think we ought to do with that one?” Segal asked the clerk who had transcribed it. Technically, there was no requirement he ask the clerks’ opinions on anything, but Eli was only in this room because his superiors had not asked his opinion, and he wanted to be a better person than they.
The clerk took off his headphones and said, “I don’t think we can do anything with it. There aren’t enough words to know what it says.”
Segal nodded.
“You would be correct except for three things,” he said. “First, the number is one that has been linked to one of the leaders of the Al Qassam Brigade. It’s not the man himself, but that phone often transmits information that winds up in the hands of Haaris Toma.
“Second and third, the words ‘double’ and ‘turn.’ Those have specific meaning to those of us in the intelligence community. I believe the message should go to Internal Affairs with a flag for attention. Hamas is possibly in the process of making one of our people into a double agent. IA should know if that’s the case.”
The clerk nodded and put his headphones back on. Segal sighed. Maybe his efforts to make the clerks feel valued by asking their opinion were just an annoyance to them. Maybe IA would be annoyed he flagged this for their attention. But he would do it anyway. His old partner had taught him to trust the nagging suspicions that rose up in the back of his head from time to time.
Even if his old partner had gotten fired for it, it was still good advice.
Segal sat down at his desk and brought his screen to life. A copy of the clerk’s transcription was already in his inbox, and he forwarded it on to Internal Affairs. That left him free to think about Cameron Dorn for a moment.
Segal still missed him. They had made a good team. Segal did the thinking; Dorn did the punching and kicking. Dorn had introduced him to fine coffee and had shown him some of the places in Jerusalem where it was possible to get it freshly ground and hand-pressed. It was, apparently, a taste the immigrant had brought over with him from America. Their relationship had begun as a professional assignment but soon had become a friendship.
In the end, Dorn had hewed to his own advice a little too closely. He wouldn’t turn away from listening to his nagging suspicion about Haaris Toma and tunnels. He had ticked off the division’s rising star and had lost his job.
Segal sighed. His partner’s disgrace had been so thorough he, too, had been taken out of the field and assigned here. It was hard to blame Dorn and yet equally hard not to. Last he heard the man was working as a tour guide now. Part of Eli Segal was glad Dorn had at least suffered a worse demotion than he had, but the other part of him still missed his friend.
**********
The moon hung in the cloudless night sky of Jerusalem as Haaris Toma waited in a windowless corner on the fourth floor of a darkened parking garage.
He was tall and powerfully built. He was the kind of man who looked like he’d been born with a thick chest and big arms, rather than having had to work for them. His hair was dark and the scar below his left eye left little doubt about his life of physical conflict.
He sometimes used the name Umar because he had an excellent cover legend set up under that name. Umar had a Jordanian passport, travel documents to be in Israel, a job back home, etc... Umar was a complete human being, except for the pesky fact about not being real.
Umar was only one of his legends. He also had full sets of identity papers for Jakob Ben Chaim, Yuri Pavelovich Akulov, and more.
His real name was Haaris Toma. Technically, he had patronymics in his name connecting him to his father and grandfather. He didn’t use them. He wasn’t proud of his family.
His weakling father had owned a shop in Jerusalem that sold tourist baubles, and the Israeli propaganda artists who went by the term “journalists” had frequently trotted him out like a trained dog for stories about how many Arabs living under the Jews actually liked it. It had been humiliating when he was growing up, and other boys had made fun of him, until he dealt with that with his fists.
Skill at fighting had only carried him so far. He could beat anyone who made fun of his father, but they did not respect him afterward. They simply mocked him behind his back.
It took him a year or two to discover the cure.
If he shouted Allah’s name when he was beating people, suddenly everyone looked at him differently. If he made a show of praying whenever the muezzin called, or when he was going to the mosques, or when he was carrying a Quran, suddenly his violence became more than violence. Suddenly, people around him saw it as a cause.
In Gaza, a young man who enjoyed the application of violence often came to the attention of Hamas. Someone who was more than just muscle — someone with skill, timing, and cunning — might go from there into the Al Qassam Brigade, the militant arm of Hamas.
Someone who could plan and see the big picture… that person might become a leader in the Al Qassam Brigade of Hamas.
That was Haaris Toma.
Now he stood at his ease in a parking garage. By throwing rocks at them, he had put out every light in the area so he could meet in total darkness. He had been surveying the meeting place for hours. His quarry was going to show up sooner or later. If he had read her right, it would be sooner. And when she did show up, Toma was going to change her life.
A brief prayer crossed his mind. As a boy, religion had been for show. But in Hamas, he had lived in the environment so long now he even prayed when there was no one to see it. He prayed to hurt his enemies.
He liked hurting people. Jews who made men like his father into pets, Arabs who reminded him o
f his father, Americans who acted like the whole situation here was entertainment — Toma liked sending bombers into markets where all of those people would die. Whether the bombers actually did end up in paradise was immaterial so long as the people who humiliated him suffered.
Much less satisfying was the act of shooting a few random archaeologists under the surface of the earth.
Much more satisfying — much more — was the act of turning a Division Director in the Shin Bet and making her betray her country and people. That was very satisfying indeed, and Toma looked forward to it.
It was enough to reinvigorate his faith.
CHAPTER 8
Siobhan McLane saw nothing but black. A hood of thick black cloth covered her entire head. She was in a chair. She felt the hard, angular metal against her back, rump, legs, and arms. The latter two were fastened to the metal chair with zip ties. Her lips were held closed with duct tape.
She had cried liberally once they left her alone in here. The moisture of her tears had loosened the duct tape a little bit, which made it easier to breathe. Being tied up and left alone was so bizarre, her mind couldn’t even process it. She was afraid but more than just afraid. This was a foreign country, she didn’t understand her captor’s speech, and she knew somewhere in the depths of all this was Umar with his gun and his complete lack of restraint when it came to ending human life.
When her emotional state fell to its lowest point, she began to blame herself. If only she had just let go of that paper, none of this would have happened. It wasn’t that big a deal.
But it was smart work as well as an interesting idea, and Siobhan wanted to know if it was real. It had been fraught with everything that drew her to archaeology in the first place – ancient mystery, history-making possibilities, and a generous dollop of wonder. She had to know. She couldn’t just turn her back on the idea and give up.
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