by Glen Craney
“That gunfire, dumb ass!”
Moshe shrugged. “Oh, that happens all the time. The Arabs on those heights over there like to use us for target practice. You get used to snipers after a while. They’ve got crappy aim.”
Exasperated, the driver shook his head as he examined the ripped tires. “Is there a petrol station or garage around here?”
“In town,” Moshe said. “You’ll have to drive to it. They don’t tow.”
The driver kicked the wheel rim, jamming his toe. He cursed as he pulled his money clip from his pocket and peeled off a couple of bills. “Listen, a kooky American chick happens to be sitting in one of those rooms up there. Keep an eye on her for me until I get back.”
“Sure thing,” Moshe said, stuffing the cash into his pocket.
When the driver rumbled away on two ruined tires, Bridget ran out of the barracks and gave Moshe a long, wet kiss in reward. “You’re my hero!”
Moshe’s grin split his face. “What do you want to do? Maybe go to the cinema?” He winked. “Or maybe …” His eyes flashed a lascivious twinkle.
She batted her Goth lashes at him. “I want to show you where I work.”
He seemed a little disappointed, but quickly got over it. “Okay.”
She looked down both ends of the main road through the kibbutz, to be sure that Cohanimwas nowhere around. Then, she grabbed Moshe’s hand and ran toward the laboratory. At the door, she took a deep breath and placed her palm against the square security monitor. Nothing. Damn, she’d been afraid of that. Cohanim had already removed her handprint from the security pad. She turned, dejected, resigned to packing up and leaving without a fight.
Moshe caught her hand to delay her. “I helped my father pour the foundation for this building.”
“That’s real interesting, but right now—”
“There’s a furnace air duct in the back.” He led her around the building and removed an iron grate over a round hole that looked no wider than three feet in diameter.
“We can’t get through that,” she protested.
“Here in Israel, tunnel-crawling is an Olympic sport. And you don’t even need to be Hamas.” Before she could stop him, he squeezed in feet first and wiggled down. “Meet me in the front.”
She replaced the grate over the hole and ran around the building to the front door again. She kept checking her watch, fearful that the chauffeur from Hell would reappear at any moment. Suddenly, the door popped open.
Moshe stood waiting for her inside with a big grin.
She planted another juicy smooch on his lips as they walked around the laboratory. She opened shelves and drawers to search for the binder. Nothing. She was about to give up when she saw a manila folder.
The tab was marked: Immaculate Deceptio.
Was that Latin, or some kind of Cohanim-pidgin-English?
Intrigued, she opened the folder and found several pages that contained what appeared to be genome structuring. She scanned down the columns, and realized that it was probably just more results from the cattle being tested here as candidates for the embryo surrogate. She started to close the folder when something odd caught her eye.
Moshe looked over her shoulder. “You understand this stuff?”
“I get paid to understand it,” she said, shaking her head. “But every day that goes by on this job, I understand less and less of it.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“This protein reading is too high for cattle. It’s more in line with human RNA protein.”
“Maybe we have some very smart and muscular cattle here.”
She stared at the data, thunderstruck. She had heard that scientists at Newcastle University in Britain were fusing human DNA with cow eggs for stem-cell research. Was Cohanim also working on some kind of human-bovine hybrid embryo? Human eggs were in very short supply. And finding women willing to submit to surgery to carry an embryo to term was expensive and time-consuming. Never mind that many bioethicists had criticized this new technique for blurring the distinction between humans and lower forms of animals.
Could this explain why Cohanim was being so secretive? If his company was involved with hybrid cow-human cloning, the bovine DNA in the cytoplasm of the cow’s egg would have been stripped out, allowing the human DNA to use the egg as a kind of nurturing shell or container.
She was no lawyer, but she figured that had to be illegal.
She hurried over to the storage refrigerator and opened it. The fertilized embryo and the backup egg brought from Dallas were still in their Petri dishes.She put on a pair of gloves and carefully removed the culture with the embryo that was scheduled for implant once the donor cow was found. She opened a testing syringe and drew a sample from the cytoplasm around the egg. Full DNA tests usually required at least a week, but she was interested in only one aspect: the level of protein. She could determine that with a quick amino acid smear test.
She squeezed a couple of drops of the cytoplasm on a litmus stick. While waiting to see if it would change color, she located the compartment in the refrigerator that held the dozens of DNA samples taken from cows on the kibbutz. She drew a sample from one of the cow cytoplasm dishes and dropped it onto a second stick.
Two minutes later, she stood staring at the two test sticks, side by side, in the light. The one stained with the Dallas embryo cytoplasm had turned darker.
“Are you okay?” Moshe asked her.
She required another moment to take in what she’d just discovered. “I can’t tell you why, but I’m going to need more time in here. Do you think you could keep that guy with the car delayed another hour in the village?”
Moshe kissed her again and then rushed through the door, off on the next assignment from his new American girlfriend with the dark-shaded eyes.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dallas, Texas
RUNNING ON FUMES FROM THIRTY-SIX HOURS without sleep, Cas wheeled their rental car out of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and sped down the freeway toward the Lone Star Industrial Park in west Dallas. He really needed a hot shower and some deep REM shut-eye, but he couldn’t afford to let the thermal satellite intel on the possible hiding place for the Stone go stale. As the exits flew by, he turned to Marly. “What was the address of those coordinates again?”
She consulted the directions from Google Maps that his old girlfriend in Brussels had printed out. “Seven fifty-one Levinson Hills Drive.”
Five miles east of Irving, Cas turned off into a seedy section of the sprawling urban mess and drove down a street lined with rundown convenience stores, iron-barred pawnshops, and gas stations with bulletproof pay windows.
Kicked back in the passenger seat, Marly checked the map again. “This area isn’t on our route.”
“Right, uh … I ran out of toothpaste.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, I’ve got practically a full tube.”
Punch-drunk, Cas peered over the wheel as he crept along and studied the forest of drab buildings, many of them without signs. Finally, he found what he was looking for and turned into a lot with cracks sprouting weeds high enough to bale for hay. He parked in front of a two-story adobe building whose windows were latticed with tie rods and wire meshing and cracked open his door. “Stay inside. And keep the doors locked.”
He bolted before she could demand an explanation. Climbing a decaying porch, he entered what looked like a junkyard shack that could have been featured on an episode of Hoarders. A few minutes later, he came out carrying a large paper sack and a used metal detector—vintage maybe 1970—that looked like the handle of a vacuum cleaner attached to a white oval disk and hooked with wires.
Marly flipped open the locks, and he slid into the driver’s seat. He squealed off, tracked by the suspicious glares of the scattered loiterers.
When they were back out on the freeway, Marly finally felt safe enough to peek inside the sack that he had placed between them. Her eyes bugged as she pulled out one of two Browning pistols. In
the bottom of the sack were five boxes of rounds. “What do you plan on doing with these? Saunter on in with both guns blazing like Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral?”
He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “You’ve been watching too many Westerns. Wyatt Earp shot the bad guys in the back before they even knew he was coming at them.”
Marly dropped the pistol back into the sack, shivering with disgust. After the incident at Abu Dhabi, if anyone had told her she would never see another gun, she would have fallen to her knees in gratitude. “You can just stroll into a place like that dump we just left and buy a firearm as easily as you can pick up a Big Mac from a drive-thru?”
“Down here, darlin’, we heart our Second Amen-de-ment.”
“Isn’t this a little overkill? We’re just going to check out a few rock fragments. Aren’t we? I mean it’s not like narcotrafficantes are going to be staked out to protect a shipment of coke.”
“First rule of covert work,” he said. “Always prepare for the worst. Al Qaeda has had sleeper cells in this country for years. For all we know, some of our Saudi friends playing both sides may have sent the Stone over here to their blood brothers for safekeeping. The last place anyone would think jihadis would keep the relic is deep in the heart of Texas.”
Marly rolled her eyes as she looked around at the junkies and homeless on the street corners. “I think I’d feel safer in Saudi Arabia.”
Cas reached over and pulled one of the pistols from the sack and checked its safety. Satisfied, he pushed the weapon into her hand. “Brownings are lock-breeched and carry a kick. You should practice with it and get used to loading it. Not as much fun as an Uzi, but you’ll manage.”
She reluctantly took the gun and practiced cocking the trigger, making a series of ominous clicks. She looked at the bullets in the sack and felt a wave of nausea. “You hired me to help you find the meteorite. I got you the location. My job is finished. Write me the check, and I’m out of here.”
Cas chuckled at her naiveté. “I’ve got three hundred bucks in my bank account. So, a wire’s not going to work.”
Marly’s face reddened. “You lied to me!” She gripped the gun tighter.
“A slight breakdown in communication. Happens all the time in my business. You’ll get your hundred grand when I deliver the Stone to the Saudis and they pay me. That’s how it works in the world of black holes, construction jobs, and off-the-books ops.” He reached to the backseat and pulled the metal detector onto her lap. “Now, make yourself useful and fine-tune the settings on this bad boy. Set it for high concentrations of iron and magnetism.”
Marly cursed under her breath. Why had she allowed herself to be drawn into this guy’s insanity? She could see all too clearly now how this was playing out. Before being snatched away from New York, she had sent a high-priority email to her supervisor asking for an unpaid leave of absence for emergency personal reasons. She was going to forfeit a month’s salary, and now this grifter was welching on his promise to pay. Before the year was out, she’d be standing in line at the Riverside Church soup kitchen and dragging her bags of rocks down Broadway in a shopping cart.
Cas pulled off the freeway and drove into a maze of streets that meandered through an industrial park. The hundreds of offices and warehouse buildings all looked the same. Seeing the sign for Littlefield, he slowed down and stopped at the curb. “The seven hundreds are the next block down.”
“Aren’t you going to call for back up?”
“And just who would I call? Chuck Norris and the Texas Rangers?” He flipped open the Browning’s chamber and loaded it with several rounds. He handed her the weapon and mocked a phone call, holding an imaginary receiver to his ear. “Captain McKinney, cover me.”
“This isn’t funny!”
Cas flipped through several fake business cards in his wallet and finally found the one he was looking for. His voice changed to a west Texas drawl as he donned a pair of thick-framed glasses and shook her hand. “Howdy, ma’am. I’m Hank Beekin, regional salesman for the Kenert Paper Company out of Beaukiss. I’m here for a sales call, but apparently I came to the wrong office. Happens all the time to me. Sorry for the intrusion.”
“I’m kind of hoping you take a bullet. Might knock some sense into you.”
Cas studied his target down the street, as if looking for signs of life. “Waal, that’s downright unfriendly of you, missy.”
“Meanwhile, I’m just supposed to sit hear and listen for gunfire?”
“Here’s the drill. Give me ten minutes to case the joint. If I’m not back by then, get the hell out of here.” He looked at his watch. “Ten after two, on the dot. Ten minutes. Not nine minutes, not eleven minutes. Comprende, girlfriendo?”
“I’m not your girlfriendo, or any other endo.”
“That’s just an affectionate Mexican term.”
“For what?”
“Bi-otch.”
She thought about using one of those bullets in the sack as a suppository for him. “And if you’re not back? I’m just supposed to leave?”
Receiving only a shrug, she nodded uncertainly, hoping in some small way that he wouldn’t return. Then, an ominous, even lethal, foreboding shot through her as Cas got out of the car and walked toward the office across the street. She watched him knock on the door and shift from side to side.
Apparently, nobody was going to answer.
Cas looked around the corner. In a flash, he disappeared down a side alley.
MARLY GLANCED AT HER WATCH. Eight minutes.
She heard steps behind the car, and ducked. Waiting but hearing nothing, she slowly peeked over the seat. A man in sunglasses and a business suit was walking toward the trunk.
She cursed under her breath as she slid her hand into the paper sack and fingered the gun’s safety. What if the jihadis had been watching them all along from the rooftops or alleys, keeping an eye out for anyone who approached? She might be in their crosshairs right now. This place freaked her out, looking as it did like a modern-day ghost town with steel and glass instead of tombstones and swinging saloon doors. Now that she thought about it, Cas never did explain why a bunch of Saudi dissidents would hide themselves in a Texas business park.
The man in sunglasses walked past her window without seeing her. He was heading for the office where Cas had just been standing.
Had the thieves sent a scout to see if Cas positioned someone for backup? She had to come up with a contingency plan fast, or Cas was a dead man. As much as she wanted to just get the hell out of here, she couldn’t just leave him. She looked at her watch, but her hand was shaking so furiously that she had to steady it with her other hand to read the time.
Two minutes left.
She looked up over the seat again. Where had the man in sunglasses gone?
He must have darted into the alley while she wasn’t looking. Those bastards would carve up Cas like gyros lamb. And they wouldn’t stop until they got her, too. She couldn’t just sit here and wait. She loaded the Browning, slid it under her sweater, and leapt from the car.
She hopped from shrub to shrub, stalking her way toward the alley next to the nearest office building. At the corner, she pulled out the gun and held it with both hands. Inching down the dark, narrow corridor, she turned back and forth, the way she had seen detectives do on television.
The back door of the building was ajar.
Cas was going to owe her big time for saving his ass on this one.
She peered around the corner. All she could see was a dark hallway. She tiptoed inside. Pointing the gun with her arms rigidly extended, she slid along the wall. What was that smell? Something chemical?
Were they preparing to dip Cas in acid? She hurried her pace, feeling her way through the darkness. She felt a doorframe and tried the knob—it turned. Slowly, quietly, she nudged the door open with her foot. In the dim light of a single bulb, the man in the sunglasses stood with his back to her. Struggling to hide the tremor in her voice, she shouted, “Hands up!”
; The man started to turn.
“Keep looking straight ahead! I’ve got a gun pointed at that bald spot on your Mongolian skull.” She felt rattled by how much she was sounding like Cas. “You so much as turn around, I’ll pull the trigger.”
The man slowly raised his hands. “Lady, you’re making a big mistake.”
She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger, firing a shot over the assassin’s head. The bullet caromed off of something metallic in the darkness.
“Jesus Aitch Christ!” The hit man ducked. “Calm down!”
Nice try, jihadi. She wasn’t falling for a fake Christian curse. After her hair-raising experience in Abu Dhabi, she felt downright exhilarated now, and she began to understand why adrenaline junkies like Cas went into this line of work. She’d really love to take out a couple of these 9/11 murderers just for the principle. She licked her lips, and aiming the gun toward the lowlife’s heart, ordered him, “Take off your jacket and pants.”
The man hesitated. “What?”
“You heard me! Strip! Or the next one will be at your ear!”
The assassin began removing his clothes, throwing them into a pile.
“Shirt and socks, too.”
Now he was down to his boxers.
Marly inched closer, crouching, keeping her weapon trained on the nearly naked man and rummaging through his clothes in search of a weapon. When she didn’t find one, she knew where it had to be hidden. “Get them off!”
The man, shaking, slipped his thumbs into the elastic band of his underwear and slid them down to his ankles.
“Now,” she ordered, trying to keep the barrel steady. “Turn around.”
The overhead fluorescents suddenly switched on. Startled, Marly swung around toward the door and fired a shot.
Cas dived into a corner. The door’s awning, rattled loose by the bullet, crashed down on him. When the clattering stopped, he peered over his forearm and made an introduction, “Dr. McKinney, meet Mr. Ari Kevan. He’s the property manager of Levinson Industrial Park. He was kind enough to take my call and let me into the office.” Cas looked at the poor, shaken man. “Sorry, sir. Please feel free to put your clothes back on.
