13th Apostle

by Richard F. Heller

  Unless, of course, they conclude I was the one responsible for all of this.

  Had Sabbie been alive, they would have joked about his growing list of criminal offenses. Now, suddenly, he was facing the very real charge of multiple homicide.

  The back door to Sarkami’s lay open. Broken locks still hung askew. Once inside, Gil wedged some furniture against the door. It offered only an illusion of protection, but he doubted that anyone was after him, at least for the moment. Besides, if somebody wanted him badly enough to knock down the pile of furniture at the door, they were welcome. He’d had enough.

  The hummus was dried out, the pita bread was stale, and the iced tea was too sweet. He was starved so, all together, it was one of the best meals he had ever eaten. Gil wolfed it down in a few minutes and rested before his next foraging expedition into Sarkami’s kitchen.

  He glanced around the room. There was an order beneath the disorder, a logic to the placement of the lights, tools, notes, and books and an organization beneath the debris when you took the time to look past the obvious.

  The best place to hide a tree is in the forest. And the best place to hide an organized counterfeiting—or rather, faux facsimile project—is in the midst of a…mess.

  Suddenly, Gil straightened. “The best place…” Those had been Sabbie’s last words. He rose with confidence, walked to the table neatly covered in white cloth, and placed his hands on the copper scroll that lay amid a mound of copper strips and facsimile scrolls. A familiar warmth greeted him. It had not been cut up after all! Gil’s heart was filled with an unexpected joy.

  This was the scroll, the one for which everyone was willing to kill or die, yet Maluka’s men had been in this very room with Gil when they took him prisoner and had missed it. It had been there, right under their noses, but they had seen only what they expected to see; worthless faux facsimiles waiting to be sent to the Museum for display.

  It was a brilliant and courageous plan. Sarkami knew his enemy and his enemy’s limitations, and he had trusted what he knew to be true. Gil wondered if Sabbie had been part of the decision to leave the real scroll in full view. He got his answer more quickly than he would have guessed.

  With an apartment full of possessions at his disposal, Gil prepared the scroll for transport. As he carefully wrapped the scroll in the bed sheet he had torn into quarters, Gil realized he had no idea where he was going. He had assumed that he would head back to the U.S.

  On second thought, with McCullum still out there, going home didn’t appear to be the wisest of choices. Besides, what would he do with the scroll? He couldn’t exactly take out an ad in the New York Times for a High Tzaddik in need of a two-thousand-year-old piece of antiquity required for the salvation of mankind.

  Gil slipped the scroll into their backpack that lay empty and waiting in the corner. The scroll would need cushioning, he thought. He pushed the faux facsimiles aside, added the strips he had taken from the warehouse to the pile, and slid the soft white cloth from the table. As he watched, a small envelope fall from its hiding place beneath the fabric. It landed at his feet. It bore the words “To Whom It May Concern” in Sabbie’s distinctive script.

  Inside, in her handwriting, once again, was the well-known Robert Frost verse. It contained a few strategically placed changes that told Gil all that he needed to know.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  but you have promises to keep.

  And miles to go before you sleep.

  And miles to go before you sleep.

  Gil gently laid the note on the scroll nestled safely in the backpack. Beside it, he slipped the passport that bore the name Arnold Ludlow beneath his own picture.

  With anticipation, he raised the white cloth to his face. As he had hoped, it smelled of vanilla, like the sweater Sabbie wore in the chapel, only a few days earlier.

  Gil held the white cloth to his chest and, with his free hand, pulled closed the backpack. Tomorrow, the soft fabric would cushion the precious cargo. But not now.

  Tomorrow he would fly to Israel in hopes of discovering for whom the scroll was intended. Tonight, he desperately needed sleep and a reprieve from thought.

  Gently, Gil laid the white cloth on the pillow next to him. Most of all, for just a few minutes more, he needed to close his eyes and to imagine that he was, once again, holding Sabbie.

  Chapter 64

  Day Fifteen, late afternoon

  Israel Museum Library, Jerusalem

  The hand that grasped Gil’s shoulder stopped him dead with his fingers poised on the computer keyboard.

  You’d think I would have learned by now.

  He had arrived in Israel only that morning and had headed straight for the Museum’s library, glued to the mainframe computer for most of the day. By accessing their Aramaic program, Gil had hoped to double check Sabbie’s translation in search of some clue she had overlooked. If the scroll was going to tell him how to proceed, he’d better be able to speak its language.

  After eight hours, Gil had to admit he was no closer to interpreting the scroll than he had been at the start. Within each phrase he thought he had translated correctly, Gil discovered a discrepancy that put a previous section in doubt. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to give up. Though he was making no real progress, the challenge, itself, had been immensely satisfying.

  Now, the sudden clasp on the back of his neck sent a wave of electricity up Gil’s back. He turned slowly. He half expected to see another pair of blond Power Angels behind him. Instead, he was greeted by the swarthy face of the man he assumed to be dead.

  “Sarkami!”

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the older man whispered. “Let’s go in the other room where we can talk.”

  The library conference room provided them with all the privacy they needed.

  “I thought you were dead,” Gil began.

  Sarkami looked surprised.

  “Sabbie said you were gone,”

  The older man laughed. “I am,” he said. “Gone…you know, gone away. Gone to Israel, to wait for you.”

  Gil recounted the events he never wanted to think about again. Sarkami showed no surprise and made no comment. As Gil described George’s unexpected second attack on Sabbie, Sarkami nodded sadly as if he had been anticipating the strange twist of events. Gil continued, then waited for Sarkami’s response.

  Sarkami hesitated, as if expecting Gil to add something beyond the finality of Sabbie’s death.

  Gil had no idea what else there was to say.

  A single tear rolled down the old eagle’s cheek. “She was well named, you know,” Sarkami said softly. “I got her out of Israel, you know, and brought her to Ludlow in London. Even though they knew everything, he and his wife, Sarah, took her in like the daughter they never had. They helped her establish a whole new identity. Actually, Ludlow was the one who gave her the name, Sabra.”

  “It means someone who is born in Israel, doesn’t it?” Gil asked. It seemed like an odd thing to do for someone who was trying to leave the past behind.

  “Yes, it comes from the name of a type of cactus; a prickly pear that maintains a thorny tough exterior that protects the sweet, softness inside.” After the Second World War, the first Israeli settlers choose the word to describe the children born to their new homeland. To survive, these children would have to have qualities similar to their namesake. Ludlow had chosen the name as both a description and a reminder to his new charge.

  Gil’s throat tightened. “She let me in, you know,” he said.

  “I hoped she would.”

  “It was important for her,” Gil confirmed solemnly.

  Sarkami laughed. “Oh, and not for you?”

  Sarkami motioned toward Gil’s notes. “So, you have the scroll, of course,” Sarkami asked.

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Sabbie and I figured you would be able to play connect the dots. Tell me, what have you learned?”

  “Nothing,” Gil admitted. “Noth
ing Sabbie didn’t already read to me from the back seat of the car. The translation is never going to tell me what to do with the scroll.”

  “Of course it won’t,” Sarkami said agreeably.

  Gil looked at him blankly.

  “You are like the man who dropped his keys in the street,” Sarkami continued.

  Gil shook his head. He had no idea what the older man was talking about.

  “There’s a wonderful story about a man whose wife finds him on his hands and knees beneath a street lamp one night. He’s searching desperately amid the debris and muck of the gutter. When asked what he is doing, the man explains that he is looking for his keys and requests his wife’s help. ‘Exactly where did you drop the keys?’ she asks. ‘Down the block,’ he answers. ‘Then why are you looking here,’ she asks. ‘Because the light’s better here,’ he explains.”

  I’ve just turned the corner and entered the Twilight Zone.

  “The point is,” Sarkami continued, “that you’re looking for your keys where the light is good but not where you lost them. You’re searching where it’s easy to look but not where you’ll find your answer. Surely, you must have realized that you’re spending your time trying to confirm what Sabbie has already told you is written in the scroll because that’s the easiest thing to do. After all, you have the scroll, you have the translation program, and you have a job to do that makes you feel like you’re getting somewhere. The only problem is, the whole task is pointless and you know it. What you need to learn next cannot be found in any scroll.”

  The anger that flashed through Gil was unreasonable. He knew it and he didn’t care. Hadn’t he been through enough? What did this man want from him?

  “What’s your point?” Gil asked coldly.

  “That depends on your goal,” Sarkami responded calmly. “If you want to enjoy the diversion of going over what has already been translated, then continue your attempt at confirmation. If you’d like to discover how to get the scroll to the person for whom it was meant, then you need to explore a different path.”

  Gil remained aloof. “And that would be…?”

  “You’re the cybersleuth,” Sarkami answered. “What have you been trying to tell yourself? Or rather, what thoughts have you been avoiding? What’s that little voice inside trying to get you to hear?”

  It was true and Gil knew it. Since he left the warehouse, he had carefully constructed a barrier within his own mind between the horror of what had happened and the clean, unmarred reality through which he was now navigating. He had been forcing himself to stay focused on what could honestly be called “busy work.”

  Gil looked at Sarkami. The great eagle seemed to be waiting for something. A hundred scenes flashed across Gil’s mind. He had been avoiding so much, for so long. When Lucy was dying, he had worked longer hours than ever before, which left her alone when she needed him most. At the time, Gil had blamed the doctor for offering the false hope that necessitated making more money. Now Gil could see that, in truth, he found it far easier to avoid dealing with Lucy’s pain as well as his own. With Sabbie, as well, he had refused to take her fears seriously, until it was far too late.

  But what was he avoiding now? That was the question. And where to find the answer.

  “That would seem like the appropriate next step,” Sarkami said, as if he had been reading Gil’s mind.

  “But I have no idea where to go from here!” Gil protested.

  “Well, that’s a start,” Sarkami replied, and turned to leave.

  “Just a thought,” the older man added before closing the door behind him. “When you discover the reason why Sabbie didn’t want you to kill George, you’ll have the answer you’ve been looking for.”

  Chapter 65

  Day Twenty-three, late afternoon

  Israel Museum Library, Jerusalem

  Perhaps it had been George’s weight or his greediness. Perhaps it was because the huge man had been such a damn good actor. Or all of the above. Whatever the reason, Gil had seriously underestimated him.

  “You’ve had eight days. What did you learn?” Sarkami asked succinctly.

  Once on the hunt, Gil had been able to access virtually every one of George’s files at CyberNet Forensics, Gil explained. Through CyberNet’s system, he had tapped into George’s home computers as well. He could have done it at any time in the past but, as George probably knew, Gil would have had no reason to even considering doing so. Throughout those eight days, a single document eluded Gil. It was an e-mail that had been created on the day George sent Gil to Israel and had been encoded with a special password.

  “At first, I figured it couldn’t be that important,” Gil said, “but there it was, sitting all by itself, in a separate partition of George’s hard drive. That bothered me.”

  For a while, Gil repeatedly attacked the defiant little document. The more it resisted each of Gil’s inventive assaults, the more determined he became. Then, after nearly a dozen attempts, Gil abandoned the futile game. In the past, he would never have walked away from a challenge, especially a chance to prove he was a better cybersleuth than George.

  “Now, it just didn’t seem to matter that much,” Gil said.

  George had left a mountain of electronic jumble behind. Much like the hard copies that littered the big man’s desk, the pile seemed endless. Then an odd pattern began to appear, Gil explained.

  With each new document he accessed, Gil discovered a pattern to the maze that made up George’s secret life. The trail was long and convoluted, a mammoth three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of illegally intercepted e-mails and Internet searches as well as unauthorized entries into secured hard drives and databases. When the pieces were dissected, then laid in clear view, they told a story of frightening genius.

  It took Gil more than a week of fourteen-hour days to work his way backward. The seed that led to the spread of George’s influence was a simple program, developed years earlier for Ludlow. It had enabled the Professor’s less affluent Museum interns to gain easy access to his communications and texts.

  “George was a graduate student back then, freelancing to make money for his tuition. He charged Ludlow half the going rate, then installed a hidden access program in Ludlow’s e-mail system.”

  “Ingenious,” Sarkami said.

  “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

  Nicknamed “Darwin,” the program began to evolve with the first e-mail the Professor received. The initial evolution provided Darwin with the ability to attach itself to every message that the Professor sent or received. The design was flawless.

  From that moment on, each piece of e-mail that entered or left Ludlow’s computer, carried within it a bit of the Darwin program. Once the bit of program took root in a new computer, it completed its own programming, providing George full and easy access. Once established, the newly established program began to evolve again. Later evolutions added websites, chat rooms, and instant messages to George’s sphere of accessibility. Whatever the user saw, George saw. Whenever he desired.

  As the final stroke to his masterpiece, George endowed the offspring of his Darwin program with their own powerful ability to replicate. Each bit of program carried orders to reproduce, immediately and often. With his cyber moles in place, George was free to sit back, read sensitive e-mails and peruse the website records of thousands of potential targets.

  “How many people are involved?” Sarkami asked.

  “Were involved,” Gil replied, “but I’ll explain that in a minute.”

  The cyber trail led from Ludlow’s little laptop through DeVris’ mainframe to the Museum’s most confidential records. From there, Darwin traveled to the computers of all of the Museum’s contributors, some of the wealthiest and most influential individuals and foundations in the world.

  Gil listed a few household names from the ranks of the rich and famous and waited for Sarkami’s shocked response. The old eagle looked unimpressed. Gil continued.

  With the world at his fingertips, Georg
e could sit at home, feet up, and while munching on his favorite snack—with a few strokes of his keyboard—could enter some of the most private recesses of banking, communications, and world politics.

  “I could tell he was planning something of gigantic proportions,” Gil said. “George trimmed his access lists daily and kept only the biggest and most powerful names. He seemed to have been biding his time because for a long time he wasn’t actually doing anything with the information.

  “Then, out of the blue, a couple of months ago, George began to access every e-mail, Internet search, or other communication that came or went through the Museum’s computer system. Anything that carried the word ‘diary’ or ‘scroll’ in it.”

  “That must have been an incredible amount of data,” Sarkami said.

  Gil laughed. “Yes, at first, it must have kept him hopping. But George knew how to minimize the workload. He simply wrote a subprogram to filter out e-mail that contained certain keywords.”

  “Is that how he picked up Hassan’s communications to Maluka?” Sarkami asked.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Go on,” Sarkami said.

  George’s interest in the diary was first piqued when an early e-mail from Ludlow to DeVris described the dairy as the discovery for which Ludlow “had been waiting all of his life.”

  “I never knew George to give a damn about anybody’s opinion,” Gil said, “but, apparently he trusted Ludlow’s judgment far more than most. From what I can tell, George figured that if the old boy thought it was important, it was well worth George’s time to check it out.”