The Prophet Conspiracy

by Bowen Greenwood

  She tried to do as he asked, but she gave up the moment she put any weight on her left ankle. She winced.

  “I can’t! I think I hurt my ankle.”

  Cam was following his own advice, crawling, and he grabbed her by the ankle she wasn’t holding and pulled her physically away from the hole.

  Just in time. They heard Toma’s gun barking behind them, and fountains of dirt kicked up where they had lain, further obscuring the sunlight.

  Siobhan made it onto her hands and knees and crawled, resting all the weight of her left side on her hand and knee.

  Behind her, Cam whispered, “This way.”

  She replied, “No, you follow me. I don’t know how deep this dig goes, but they’re going to have laid down a wood walkway as far as they can to help people not step on finds. That’s how it works on dig sites. If there’s a second way out of here, that wood walkway will lead us to it.”

  She crawled through the dirt and clutter of archeology, scraping her hands on picks which had been left lying around and getting splinters from various boards and pieces of wood the archaeologists had been using to build their walkway or shore up the walls.

  Sure enough, she soon laid her hand on a wooden board fixed to the dirt, as well as others beside it. Siobhan picked the direction heading away from the light and began crawling that way. Remembering her painful experience in Hezekiah’s tunnel, she tried to stick a hand out in front of her each time she moved an arm or a leg forward.

  Kendrick had been digging here for years. Their crawl went on a long time.

  ********

  Haaris Toma was forced to make a decision. The most obvious choice was to go after Dorn and the American. That would leave Kendrick as a loose end, so the obvious choice was to kill him.

  The fly in that ointment was Maya Godwin. She insisted on proof the dig was what he said it was before she would help him destroy it. He could just follow through on his blackmail threat, but that just pointed out the fundamental weakness of blackmail: once the threat was executed, the mark had no more reason to obey you.

  He could get a Hamas bomber to do it, of course. They had many of them. But he had been very boastful with the elders about his ability to shield their own true believers from the wickedness. Hamas was not an organization where failing in one’s boasts led to a long life.

  To keep his promises he needed Maya. To get Maya’s cooperation he needed Kendrick. And without her phone, the American girl was no more a threat.

  He dropped the magazine from his pistol and slammed another home in a smooth, practiced motion. He swung the weapon around to Kendrick.

  The professor’s mouth hung open, and he stared at the gun as if he could read the barrel.

  “Just as I promised you, professor. You live.”

  ********

  Professor Kendrick sat in the passenger seat of a car, breathing through his nose. Silver duct tape held his lips together. Zip ties held his hands and feet together. A black bag over his head kept him from seeing where they were driving. Beneath him, the seat felt like leather. The air conditioner blew blessedly cool air on his face, though he could feel the sun’s heat through the window to his right.

  It had all gone so terribly wrong.

  He had kept his promise to himself. When the chance came to take a step toward turning his failure into triumph, he had seized it. He read the inscription in Siobhan’s picture. And it was everything of which he had dreamed.

  The theory was correct. Siobhan’s paper — his! — was correct. The inscription was exactly what both of them wanted.

  “In Muhammad’s dream, the steed Buraq carried him here and in that dream he ascended to paradise. He told me himself. He named this place and described it perfectly. I heard it, and I recorded it.”

  It was exactly what he had been digging for for years. And at the moment of his triumph — when he knew of success and she did not, when she was wanted by the government on an obviously trumped up charge of being a terrorist and couldn’t get back to America — at that moment, this madman with a gun had shown up.

  The girl and her companion were probably dead. They had dived into the dig, but the terrorist had emptied his pistol down the hole right after them. In all likelihood, he would never hear from Siobhan McLane again.

  He had never wished that on her. He had always hoped she would go on to some other career outside of archaeology and have a good life.

  But her fate wasn’t his concern. Whatever befell her faded into nothingness when held against the bright, shining light of real academic success.

  All he had to do was find where she uncovered the wall, go there, take another picture, and he would be set forever. He could look forward to a named chair. His book about the find would reach beyond the academic press and gain popular acclaim.

  All of it had been his, until this psycho had tied him up and covered his eyes.

  There was a verse in both the Bible and the Torah about vengeance belonging to God.

  To Kendrick, the words would normally mean nothing. All the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions were simply source texts to him.

  And yet, as he was kidnapped by an armed man and dragged toward a fate that grew more terrible with every imagining, those words kept coming back to him.

  There was no question he had done wrong to Siobhan. He justified it with the belief she would go on and find another career outside archeology but now she was probably dead, and he was a prisoner of a terrorist.

  What if this thug with his ugly black handgun killed him?

  Kendrick had never had a gun pointed at him. He had never even seen one in the real world. His newfound knowledge of what it felt like to have the barrel of one touch his neck weighed heavily on his thinking.

  He had never been this close to death before.

  Outside his pitch-black hood, he could hear his kidnapper talking on the phone.

  The words were in Arabic. Kendrick read it well, but speaking it was a challenge. Understanding it when it was shouted at high speed by an angry man was something else entirely. He made out a few words – threat, kill, and a few profanities. But the real message rose from the volume and the tone of voice.

  The man beside him wanted to lash out and cause pain.

  CHAPTER 22

  In the darkness, Siobhan crawled on her hands and knees, favoring the left one. She followed the trail of boards deeper and deeper into the blackness, hoping somewhere there was another entrance. Every so often, her fingers brushed up against stones or pottery shards. Once she touched what she knew to be a plastic bucket.

  Then she felt the dry, curved shape of a rib bone. Probably an animal’s.

  “Oh please, God, let it be an animal’s,” she whispered.

  “What?” was the whispered reply from behind her.

  “Nothing,” she said and kept crawling. She had been on digs as a student — most often to Native American sites back home. She had also been on that first dig in Jerusalem. In both cases, though, there had been a network of work lamps strung from the ceiling. She imagined there was here, too, but it was off, and Cameron was absolutely opposed to turning on any lights.

  Distant shouting in Hebrew gave the obvious reason. The Shin Bet was here. Either turning on her phone had drawn them or else the workers on Kendrick’s dig had called in an alarm after the gunshots. Either way, barely-heard purposeful shouting and clamoring reached them from above.

  He had given her one single mission: find them a place to hide before Shin Bet agents came down the hole and into the tunnel.

  She had no idea how to fulfill that mission. So far, there had been no break in the narrow walls.

  Her left hand slipped into nothingness.

  Siobhan clamped her jaw shut around a scream as she almost pitched forward onto her face. The sudden weight on her left side made her rest on her foot, and the pain shot up through her leg. She pulled her left hand back and cautiously felt the ground in front of her until she found the place where it gave way to emp
ty space.

  “There’s a hole here,” she whispered.

  “Can you reach across it?” Cam whispered back.

  She tried. She inched forward on her knees until they were right at the lip of the drop off. Then she stretched as far forward as she could safely balance. Her hands definitely could not find the bottom. She did reach the far edge, but she didn’t feel sure at all she could get across it. Not when the ceiling was so low she had to crawl on her hands and knees.

  Cam wanted to study the situation himself, so she squirmed backward while he climbed over her. It was awkward having him crawl over her, but it was worth it to be away from the ledge.

  After a few moments, she heard him whisper, “We can get across this, but I think we might be better served by going down.”

  “Down?” Siobhan squeaked. “I’d rather go up.”

  “Not while my former colleagues are here. We want to hide until they leave. And they’ll be coming down here any minute. If I were with them, I’d search the hole. It’s a simple matter of being thorough.”

  He continued, “I’ve got a plan. I felt a longer board back in the initial chamber we fell into. I’ll go back and get it. We’ll head down this shaft and pull the board across behind us. That will make it look like, if we were here, we went across and continued on.”

  Siobhan really didn’t like the thought of crawling down that pitch black hole, but it was hard to poke holes in Cam’s plan. She agreed, and Cam crawled back over her to go back the way they came and find the board he was sure was there.

  That left her sitting all alone in the pitch dark next to a hole that, as far as she knew, had no bottom.

  Every sound was magnified. The distant voices of the investigating Shin Bet agents above ground seemed always to be coming nearer. She could hear every single scrape and brush as Cam crawled. All the while, the blackness pressed against her eyes so hard it was nearly a physical sensation.

  Finally, Cameron returned.

  “I’ll go down first,” he whispered. “Then you get most of the way in, pull the board across the hole so it looks like we used it to cross, and follow me down.”

  He made sure she had touched the board so she could keep track of it. Then he crawled over her and awkwardly turned around so his feet would be going down the hole first.

  “Hold my forearms as tight as you can,” he whispered. “I may need you to pull me back up if there’s no foothold.”

  Siobhan didn’t like the sound of her pulling him back up; he looked like he weighed nearly twice as much as she did, and she pointed that out in a whisper.

  “We don’t know for sure what’s down this hole,” Cameron replied. “It’s probably nothing. But it might be anything, including something dangerous. And if one of us has to go into danger first, it will be me.”

  She still didn’t think she could pull him up, but after that explanation she agreed.

  Cam was holding most of his own weight with his hands gripping the wooden crossbeams of the trail they’d been following. Slowly, he let more and more of his legs down into the hole, and then began to go the rest of the way over. Siobhan added as much grip as she could.

  “No foothold yet,” Cam grunted.

  That’s when Siobhan heard voices near the tunnel entrance behind them.

  “Cam, they’re coming!” she whispered.

  He didn’t reply; he just eased more and more of himself over the edge.

  “Got it!” he said. “There’s a rock here that will take my weight.”

  She couldn’t see him easing down into the hole but behind her she could hear orders being barked in Hebrew and the sound of feet on the ladder.

  “Come down, Siobhan,” Cam said. “I’m done with the first foothold now.”

  She stayed still for a moment. The prospect of lowering her weight into that unknown depth completely blind, hoping to find one rock capable of supporting her weight, felt foolhardy in the extreme. No matter what Cam might say about Shin Bet interrogations, it had to be better than dying blindly in the dark by falling into a bottomless pit.

  In the distance, she saw a flashlight turn on, and that changed her mind.

  Inch by inch, she lowered herself down the same way Cam had. The muscles in her hands ached from gripping the boards so hard. Her arms burned from the effort of holding her weight up. She was almost ready to give up and be captured when her toe brushed the rock Cameron had mentioned. She put her weight on it and took a gulping deep breath when it held.

  At the last minute, she remembered to pull the board into place, like a bridge across the hole. Balancing her weight carefully on that one foothold, she inched the board across as slowly as she could to avoid excess noise. She even scattered half a handful of dirt on it to improve the illusion they had gone across it.

  The next foothold was easier to find. With the third one, she had to grope blindly with her leg at full extension until she finally brushed it with the barest tip of her hiking boot. With every step, she felt her muscles wanting to cramp up from overexertion. Sweat poured off her face in tiny rivers.

  Above her head, she heard a curse in Hebrew, and some pebbles fell down onto her head.

  Years ago, she’d been taking Hebrew 101 and knew with certainty, one day she’d be fluent in it. But disuse and despair had atrophied her linguistic skills to the point where now she could barely make out the words for “hole” and “careful.”

  She held herself perfectly still, salty sweat irritating her eyes. If perspiration made noise, they’d catch her for sure. She prayed vigorously for Cam’s plan to work.

  Slowly, one at a time, four Shin Bet agents shimmied across the board.

  Once they were gone, and had been gone a long time, she finished the climb down to Cam’s level. The two of them were squeezed together in the hole tighter than if they were slow dancing. There was no light to see him but the physical sensation of closeness was unavoidable.

  ********

  The manhunt for the terrorist Cameron Dorn had grown into an all hands on deck project. Every agent with any kind of field experience was being taken off their other duties and given one simple mission: stop him before he killed again. Everyone understood, whether or not Dorn survived the stopping was immaterial to their Division Director.

  All of which worked in Eli Segal’s favor. His one-time exile to the wiretapping bureau was over. He was back in the field. He considered it mildly amusing that the same woman who had delighted in punishing him with the low-status assignment was now setting him free of it. But in the end, it didn’t matter.

  Segal wasn’t given a choice about whether to join the hunt for Dorn, of course. But even so, he didn’t come with the same purpose in mind as all the other agents.

  Unlike them, he did not believe Dorn was guilty.

  Ever since the bombing of al Aziz’s home, the character of the hunt had changed for Segal. Now, his goal was to find out who was framing Dorn and why.

  Colleagues had searched every inch of the dig site. Some had even gone so far as to crawl through the underground portions where the archaeologists were working. There had been many signs Dorn had been here, but the man himself had apparently left.

  While other agents, more in favor with the Director, searched the dig, Segal was stuck questioning people. He did it with an eye toward what he knew to be true: something else was going on here, rather than Cameron Dorn being a terrorist. As he interviewed suspects at the baking-hot dig site in the southern Negev, his questions had a different character than the other agent who had been assigned the same task.

  “Did you see anyone else unusual at the dig today?”

  The young student archaeologist had already described Cameron and the American woman perfectly. Apparently, she had met them when they arrived and directed them to the trailer of one Professor Wilson Kendrick, who was in charge of this operation.

  She shook her head at the question about anyone else, and Segal dismissed her to question the next worker. This one was male and a few
years older but, like the previous, he was an American student of archeology.

  “Nope. Didn’t see those two. Heard everyone else talking about them, though. Guess they kidnapped Professor Kendrick or so they say. At any rate, he’s gone from here. No one has seen him since early morning. Never saw those other two myself.”

  “Did you see anyone else unusual at the dig today?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, I did.”

  Segal felt the corners of his mouth ease upward. He had expected to get this answer eventually. It felt good to finally make a bit of progress.

  “What can you tell me about this individual?”

  Segal asked the question with no expectation whatsoever. He didn’t know who was framing his old partner, so he had no preconceived idea of what the answer should be. He just assumed the physical description would be pretty dark skinned and dark haired, like nearly every single person who lived in the region.

  The guy shrugged. “Don’t really know. Was pretty early when he showed up. Barely dawn. A dude for sure. He did have a nasty scar, though. Right under his eye.”

  A chill shot through Segal’s body, and the hairs on his arm stood on end.

  “Can you remember which eye the scar was under?”

  “Don’t know… let’s see… I was facing this way and saw him… okay. Had to be the left. Left eye.”

  Segal concluded the interview and did not start another one. Haaris Toma was here. He remembered that cell phone call his clerks had intercepted a piece of a couple days ago. Haaris Toma working to double someone in the Shin Bet. “Double” was a term of art in the intelligence and counter-intelligence business. It meant to cause a person to betray their own side – to become a double agent. Segal suspected the call his clerks had intercepted on Friday was about that very subject. And then Toma showed up here.

  He went to talk to Godwin. He located her sitting in one of the workers’ trailers, which she had commandeered for herself. A blast of beautiful cool air greeted him when he opened the door. She was on a call, though, so he stepped back outside to wait.