“That’s it?” Relief eased the tension in her nerves. Two places was better than the world over.
“Nope. There’s more. He began to read. ‘In 2003, some author hypothetically concluded that the Ark of the Covenant was taken to Mount Sinai. There are those who speculate that King Solomon gave it to the Queen of Sheba to return home with her. French author Louis Charpentier claimed that the Ark was taken from Jerusalem to the Chartres Cathedral in France by the Knights Templar.’”
He paused to flip the notepad page. “‘Several recent authors theorize the Ark was taken instead to the village of Rennes-le-Chateau in Southern France. Other references claim it to have been kept in the Rome’s Basilica of St. John Lateran but was lost when the basilica burned. In the early 1900’s British Israelites carried out some excavations of the Hill of Tara in Ireland, looking for the Ark, but the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland campaigned successfully to have them stopped before they destroyed the hill.’”
She sighed. “Maybe we would have been better off scouring the U.K. when we were there.”
He tossed the notepad on the bed behind them. “What did you come up with?”
“Not that much.” She glanced down at her almost illegible notes of abbreviations. Lucky for her, the Camel Hilton had thick, cheap-ass toilet tissue that had withstood her lip balm’s scratchy efforts. “Five flights out from gates in the murder area in that time span. “Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” She fumbled with the tissue, spreading it out on her knee. “Let’s see, the next one is Sana’a, Yemen. Then, Amman, Jordan. What’s this? Becky? No, Mecca. Mecca, Saudi Arabia. And some place here in Egypt. Sharm El something or the other.” She raised her brows at this last destination. “Ever heard of it?”
“Sharm El Shiekh. In the Sinai Peninsula. A couple hours or so from Mount Sinai.”
“Just great. It all comes down to a 404 – not found.” She wadded the toilet tissue and tossed it over her shoulder. “You connect the dots.” Rising, she started pacing, rubbing her upper arms once more.
He unfolded his frame, stalking up the floor’s incline in the opposite direction of her tread. Thumbs jammed in his frayed jeans back pockets, he muttered. “What do each of those five destinations have in common with the Ark? If anything.”
She thought, then ticked off on her fingers. “According to Charley’s research of the Ark’s wonderings, the flight destination of Mecca isn’t among them. That helps. That narrows our list to four.”
Jack stroked his mustache. They drew even with each other again. “Then what do those four have in common?”
“Well, the first two cities, Addis Ababa and Amman begin with the letter A.”
Passing her, he lifted skeptical slashes of brows.
“Well, other than that, probably a godzillion things.”
“Well then,” he growled, “what don’t they have in common?”
“Probably a godzillion things.”
Three and a half paces, turn. Three and a half paces rub shoulders with Jack. Three and a half paces, turn. Three and a half paces rub shoulders with Jack. Three and a half paces turn.
Go home, The Voice had instructed. She mulled over this through another round of cadenced pacing, then halted in the middle of the small room abruptly. “What did Charley tell you about King Solomon?”
Jack swung around to face her, blinked, then said, “You smell of our lovemaking.”
She frowned. She had showered. “Your senses are growing more acute.” If only those long legs encased in ragged hole jeans weren’t to drool over. “Now what did Charley tell you about King Solomon?”
Beneath his black t-shirt, his muscled shoulders rolled into a shrug. “He said something about King Solomon giving the Ark to the Queen of Sheba.”
“No. No, there was more. I’m sure of it.”
He reached over, grabbed his notepad off the bed. “‘Some speculate that King Solomon gave it to the Queen of Sheba to return home with her.’”
Her mouth opened, then shut. Would he think her crazy?
“You don’t have to say a word. It’s The Voice again, isn’t it. ‘Go home’?”
She nodded, her lips compressed in the Unhappy Face curve.
His fists went to his hips, his legs spread in a ‘give-it-up-to-me stance. At least, he didn’t roll his eyes again.
“Well, that ought to be an easy enough dot to connect.”
He lowered his head. From beneath his uncompromising straight brows, his eyes peered at her in an expression that asked well-what?
She wrinkled her nose in frustration. “Where did our good Queen Sheba call home?”
He nodded, whipped out his cell phone, redialed and waited for the call to ring through. “Where was the Queen of Sheba from, Charley?” Jack turned on his cell phone speaker and placed it on the nightstand. They both hovered near it, waiting. “Can you Google it, pumpkin head?”
After several silent moments, Charley answered, “Hush, everywhere. Or, maybe, nowhere,”
“Everywhere?” Jack asked. “Nowhere?”
“Really, Dad. Wait, wait a minute. Here, it says ‘the Queen of Saba, pronounced Sheba, was thought to have been born sometime in the 10th century BC. Her grandfather from his deathbed appointed her as his successor to the Kingdom of Arabia Felix. Says that Latin for Happy Arabia.”
Jack rubbed his forehead. “So, that area roughly approximates the Middle east today. Needle in the haystack.”
“Listen,” Charley said, getting into the excitement of the challenge, “The paragraph that follows say the Queen of Sheba left Arabia Felix after the death of her son and moved her court to Ethiopia.”
Jack jerked alert. “Ethiopia?”
“No so quick,” Janet said, moving closer to the nightstand and the cell phone. “From where did she rule? Where exactly was her home, Charley?”
* * * * *
Egypt Air swooped over the vastness of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world. Somewhere below among the gigantic, hundreds of feet-high sand dunes and red canyons was the temple of the Queen of Sheba.
And, just maybe, the Ark of the Covenant.
Occasionally, Janet made out a patch of greenery surrounded by a few tiny mud-box houses. And then nothing but the monotony of beige sand once more. “I’m home,” she thought.
But as the plane crested the 12,000-foot-high Jabil an-Nabil Su-aye and made its descent into the mountain-bowled valley of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, she realized that nothing here was like back home in Hopiland. Except the lack of water. According to Google, Sana’a’s two-million population was scheduled to die of thirst within the next five years.
A terrible irony, since Noah’s son Shem was said to have founded Sana’a after the Great Flood.
Yemen had been known as Arabia Felix because a millennium before the land had been rich and fertile. With the present unrest and turmoil, Sana’a was not the best place for Westerners sightseeing. The capital was a spooky mixture of Islamic extremists, powerful tribal leaders, anarchic hot-headed rebels, and soldiers loyal to rival political factions.
Graceful Arabic letters softened Sana’a airport’s dingy custom area. Ahlen washmen – Welcome. Looking around Janet realized she had been the only female on the flight and now here. Hundreds of males but no females. It was as if when the Queen of Sheba had left Yemen, she had taken all the women with her.
The men, some in Western garb and some in sparkling white robes with curved daggers at their waists openly stared. Was it her curved scar resembling their daggers that caught their attention? Her ball cap covered her lack of hair, so that probably wasn’t it. All the males had one thing in common – a left cheek-pouch of something they chewed. Well, make that two things in common. They all had badly stained teeth.
Diplomatic relations with Egypt had honored her Homeland Security ID and allowed her and Jack to bypass customs, but Yemen was a whole new ballgame. It was the most impoverished of Arab countries and the most terrorist-ridden. Ben Laden
’s father was a Yemen native. Al Qaeda was headquartered here. And other than for procreating purposes, females were considered non-essential – nothing like her matrilineal culture.
Jack’s hand at her elbow steered her past the baggage claim area with its creaking carousel. She carried only her backpack and Jack his canvas carryon. They had nothing to declare at Customs. They needed only to purchase the requisite two month tourist visa issued by the Interior Ministry.
At the high counter loomed a saturnine immigration official. Jack handed him a wad of riyals for the visas. The man’s narrowed eyes surveyed her alone, traveling from her hiking boots up to her Dallas Cowboys billed cap. She was more than uneasy. After a long tension-filled moment, the official stamped first Jack’s visa and next hers.
She began to breathe again as they headed toward the exit – and stopped breathing when the soldier in a rumpled army-green uniform and a head cloth stepped in front of her. He wore a Saddam Hussein mustache and cradled an AK-47. In formal English, he said, “Madam, I will have to ask you to surrender your weapon, the knife in your boot.”
He had to be kidding, not with all the curved daggers as plentiful in the airport as luggage?
“I will also have to ask you to come with me.”
Her gaze hardened into obsidian. “Why?”
“You’re under arrest as a suspected terrorist.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While her rapist showered, Yasmin Yamani lay strapped to the hotel bed’s headboard by cuffs that looked like bread ties and gagged by several layers of heavy-duty square bandages. She had been raped before. Many times. The Yemen regime was not friendly to female dissidents. She probably would have been beheaded because of her passionate activist outbursts, except for her international prominence as the president of Yemen’s Female Journalists Against Oppression.
Her last impassioned outburst, “People will never be free as long as women are oppressed, and they always are oppressed under religious leadership,” had last landed her in Central Prison four, maybe five months ago. She had lost track of time. Clarity of thought seemed beyond her capacity right now. Just vivid memories. More recent ones were of Change Square in front of Sana'a University, the locus of anti-government protests . . . and the armored vehicles . . . and the shouting of her beleaguered people . . . and the tear gas . . . and the beatings.
She had been banished from Yemen instead of executed. But she was back. Back at the capital’s Hotel al Salam in the Old City on Felahi Square, coincidentally. The hotel, her favorite hangout, because it had the best cheese sambosas and cappuccinos, also had a wireless internet that often worked and a generator for when the power went out, which it often did, almost daily. But no big surprise. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was on schedule to be the world’s first capital that would run out of water – if it didn’t first run out of oil, its black-gold.
And trailing on the thought of water, came the halt of the shower’s water. Would she be raped again . . . or this time murdered? Her violator had a gun, a pistol. She had watched him withdraw its parts from various compartments in this luggage and assemble them. Then, smiling serenely he had crossed to her, shoved the gun up between the legs and said, “Dying doesn’t have to be unpleasant.”
He had spoken conversationally with her. A one-sided conversation, since she was gagged. “You know, the drama of suffering and salvation seem more and more comprehensive and convincing to me when here, so close to the Holy Land.” This he told her as he unpacked his shaving kit. The way his finger tested the edge of his razor’s blade telegraphed torture.
He had admitted to snapping the neck of her escort, her cousin Ali Ibrahim. Had she not been trying to re-enter her country, this time on an illegal Egyptian passport, she would have raised the alarm. Screamed. Fought back. Instead, she had calculated that with her captor, she stood a slight chance of living. With her country’s present regime, no chance once they discovered her identity. Three times in Central Prison and you’ve lost your head.
But now, here she lay . . . perhaps as a sacrifice to her profession as a journalist. She watched as the American padded toward her, as buff as they come with even his head shaven. He had wrapped his lower torso in a towel. Why? Had she not seen his nakedness these past few hours while he raped her repeatedly? So often that she was painfully raw and surely bleeding. Or was the warmth between her thighs merely his sticky semen burning her lacerated flesh?
He paused beside the bed, and her breath sucked in, drawing into her mouth thick gauze that caused her to gasp hopelessly.
From the start, he had left her legs free, and she had attempted to kick him where it would give the most pain. Easily he had subdued her ankles, grinning all the while, as if her futile resistance gave him even greater pleasure. And that charming smile, temporarily absent of the toothpick he compulsively chewed, frightened her more than anything. The smile told her he took pleasure in her sexual pain. Would he take pleasure in her death?
For the moment, his interest was focused on her handbag, which he efficiently ransacked. His fingers flicked through her wallet, surprisingly bypassing her stash of riyals to pause on her Press Pass. His glance swiped her face and returned to the Pass. “Yasmin Yamani. Hmmm. The name is familiar. Yes, your name’s filed in a lot of Middle East diplomatic dossiers.”
Something in her frowned. This American would know this?
Lifting her Press Pass aloft between two fingers, he mused, “Yemen’s Living Legend activist. But for how long?”
Only a scholar of middle-eastern politics would recognize her name. Did he work for a western power? Yemen’s secular-tribal patriarchal state? Or was he just a lone and gratuitously cruel predator? She shuddered.
He tossed the press pass on the hotel nightstand along with her wallet and turned to her. His cell phone rang. Without taking his cold eyes off her, he reached for his thermal jacket and slipped the cell phone from the jacket pocket. “Yes. Menelek’s tomb? Five o’clock Tuesday it is then.”
Finished with the call, he turned the cell phone toward her then clicked, and she realized he had snapped a photo of her, nude and bound. That did not bode well. She shivered violently. Cell phone returned to his jacket, he knelt on one knee over her. His body braced by fists at either side of her head, trapped her hair, unhampered by the hijab. His pale blue eyes burned like hot ice. They had not a glimmer of humanity in them. “You smell of frankincense. And, of course, my cum.”
Her skin shriveled at the delight in his gaze. A gaze that lacked a sense of remorse. One fist lifted from the mattress and she stiffened for the blow. Instead his hand glided to her right one, bound at the headboard. His rapt attentive gaze inspected her hand. “The henna decoration is really exquisite.”
She cringed yet could not escape the light brush of his fingertips on her wrist. “I will be sad to snuff you when I leave.” He made a sorrowful expression. “Especially someone with hands as beautiful as yours. If only I could take them with me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I don’t give a rat’s ass. You’re not taking my passport.”
The hotel desk clerk, a bespectacled young man in a plaid shirt and a red checkered table cloth that passed for a headdress shrugged. Behind him, a sticker on the wall had a black arrow pointing toward Mecca. “Then, you cannot stay here.”
At the risk of leaping the counter and ripping the carotid artery from the man’s throat, Jack drew a steadying breath. As Janet was being hustled away by the turbaned police at either side of her, she had yelled out over her shoulder to wait for her at the hotel. So that he would do.
He was frustrated beyond reasoning. He had left his phone charger at the dump of a hotel in Cairo, and his cell phone couldn’t pick up a signal for summoning help from Home Security. From the airport, he had had to negotiate a ransom fare with a toothless taxi driver in Arabic for a ride to the hotel. Worse, the Sheraton, Sana’a’s largest, this one wasn’t.
The Hotel al-Salam was lodged behind Sana’a’s Old City wa
lls. The open-windowed taxi had careened through Baab al-Yemen, the huge main gate in the Old City walls, and plunged into a civilization as different as Tulsa was from Timbuktu. Stop lights were mere suggestions to the singing madman of a driver. He had nearly taken out cross-legged merchants on the ground, surrounded by pyramids of fruit, piles of dusty plastic flip-flops, and wheelbarrows brimming with shiny green fronds.
Behind the gates of Old City, the most conservative part of Sana’a, millennium-old, cookie-colored tower houses with white-frosted-like elaborate windows fought for precious space with mosques and minarets. Men in flowing robes crowded narrow cobblestone streets. Here and there a woman, shrouded like a black ghost, would vanish into a doorway.
The taxi had screeched to a halt in Felahi Square, cast in shadows by the late afternoon sun. Studded with cobblestones and bustling with men, the square consisted of stalls and shops near a large mosque. Jack had struggled his lengthy frame from the back seat, exiting into a fog of exhaust, male sweat, and cumin. Riotous colors and rioting smells exploded like hand grenades around him.
And now this. Janet was somewhere in jail, and his passport was being held hostage by this apathetic hotel receptionist.
“Hey, man, can I be of help?”
Jack’s gaze swung to his left. A slender, swarthy young man a lot shorter than he flashed him a dazzling smile. Urbane, with mischievous eyes and a flop of crisp curling black hair, the young man was dressed in a freshly pressed white shirt, khaki dress trousers, and, oh God, a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. “That depends,” Jack asked warily but reluctantly grateful to hear an American accent.
“Just make a copy of his passport, Ishmail.” The young man directed an inquisitive glance up at Jack. “American, aren’t you?” He pointed toward a couple of overstuffed couches banking a coffee table in the lobby. “While we wait, we can have a cup of moccha straight from the old port of Al Mokha, the birthplace of coffee. You know, our present-day Al Mokhans could have been the Starbuck entrepreneurs of the world.”
Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Page 7
