Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) (2 page)

“Thanks for the tip, Katz,” came the reply. “But with no more to go on than that, I’m afraid there’s not much we can do at the moment. We can’t go raising hell around that area without an okay from the Prime Minister’s office, and they don’t want to rile the Americans right now.”

Katz frowned. “Okay.”

“If he’s a runner,” said the voice, “he’ll be heading back soon. Put him on your watch list. If he shows, call us and we’ll have a chat with him.”

Three days later Khaled Assah arrived at the
Allenby
Bridge
checkpoint in a taxi. When he stepped out of the vehicle, Sergeant Katz instructed him to get his bag and come inside the small building. It contrasted sharply with the structures across the border decorated with likenesses of the King of Jordan. The taxi was sent on its way.

“What’s the problem?” Khaled asked.

After patting him down, Katz nodded toward a chair. “Have a seat. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

Khaled’s knees felt a bit wobbly as he lowered himself onto the plastic chair. What did they know? he wondered. There had been no hint of trouble during his brief visit home. He was a day late getting back to the
Bethany
project. Had the university people somehow found out about the scroll? Were they looking for him? That seemed unlikely.

As he watched the uniformed guard speak into the phone, he began to sweat.

They came for him in a dust-colored van with darkened windows. Two hard-eyed men with solemn faces got out. Neither was large, but both were muscular. They were dressed casually, with open-collared shirts. One with black hair and skin almost as dark as his own ordered him into the van. He was instructed to empty his pockets, then handcuffed and seated beside a third man who looked even tougher than the other two.

As the van sped off down the road, the interrogation began.

“What did you do with the dope?” the third man asked. He had a bald head, large arms and a scar on his cheek that appeared to be from a knife wound.

Khaled’s mouth dropped open. “Dope?”

“It was hidden in your shirt when you came across three days ago,” the other man said. “Who did you sell it to?” He had a guttural voice and an accent. Maybe German.

“I . . . I didn’t have any dope.”

Scarface leaned forward until their noses were almost touching. “Don’t give me that shit, boy! Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

Khaled shuddered. They were undoubtedly from Shin Bet, the Israeli security service.

“Honest, sir,” he said. “I didn’t bring in any narcotics.”

“Then what the hell was it? You’d better talk, boy, or we just might have to beat you to a pulp.”

Khaled began to babble, his story spilling from his lips. “It was a scroll . . . a parchment. I found it in a cave near Tell Mar Elias. It was written in Hebrew. I brought it over here to get somebody to help me–”

“You expect us to believe–”

“It’s true . . . it’s true. May Allah strike me dead!”

As the Shin Bet agents probed, he told it all. After explaining his role as an archaeology student, something they could confirm with the papers he carried, Khaled described the slide that had caused him to stumble onto the scroll. And he related the story told in the document, winding up with word that his cousin, Abdullah Kafi, was helping him look for someone with knowledge of the kabbalist secrets.

“The scroll did not say where the menorahs were hidden?” asked Scarface.

“No. There was only a statement: ‘The location will be found within.’”

“Within what?”

“The document, I suppose. All we knew about the kabbalists was that they had developed some codes for secret writing.”

“Where is the document now?” the black-haired agent asked.

“Abdullah was taking it to
Jerusalem
to meet someone who could steer us in the right direction.”

“Who was he taking it to?” Scarface had turned surly again.

Khaled shook his head. “I don’t know. He left Ramallah before I did. He said he was meeting somebody from the Guardians of Palestine. Somebody who would know somebody . . . ”

Khaled knew it was not what they wanted to hear.

Scarface turned to his partner. “Guardians of
Palestine
. That bunch of young punks Nathaniel reported on.”

The other agent nodded. “An offshoot of Hamas, as I recall. Ties to Hezbollah in
Lebanon
. It might help to check out this Kafi boy.”

As Khaled slumped in the seat, Scarface pulled out a cellular phone and punched in a number.

“Run this through the computer,” he instructed the voice at Shin Bet headquarters. “Subject named Abdullah Kafi, nineteen years old, Palestinian from Ramallah. See if we have anything on him.”

He stared at Khaled as he listened to the wearying silence.

After an interminable wait, the voice on the security service phone came back apologetically. “Sorry it took so long, but something just came in. I had to check it out. Seems you’re a little late on this one.”

“Oh?”

“Young Kafi’s body was found about half an hour ago near the Damascus Gate. Apparently he’d been rammed by a car. Not a pretty sight, they say.”

Book One

The Hostage Takers

Chapter
1

The
Mediterranean
shimmered in the morning sun as I swung the camcorder in a slow pan of the
Jaffa
waterfront. Gulls circled above the world’s oldest working port. A steady breeze bore the smell of salt and dry seaweed.

“Come on, Greg,” Jill called. “Keep playing with that little black box and you’ll miss the bus.”

I smiled at her. “Just so I don’t miss the bus for dinner. Besides, you’re the one who made sure I brought plenty of tapes.”

I popped a stick of Mr. Wrigley’s famous Spearmint into my mouth. I’d quit smoking a few months earlier and was suffering the inevitable withdrawals.

“Maybe so. But I didn’t intend for you to use the tapes as if they were going out of style.”

I let it go. For a man who had survived sixty-five years on his wits, that was a concession.

“Are you going to put together a film for the next class party?” Folds of dark hair above an arched brow belied her sixty-plus years.

“I’ll limit it to epic proportions,” I said.

All kidding aside, I had counted on this trip to separate me by time and distance from the agonizing predicament making my life unbearable back home. My situation seemed as insolvable as the standoff between the Palestinians and Israelis. Here it was played out with rocks, bullets and bombs. In my case, I felt the entire Metro Nashville Police Department was lined up like some Civil War regiment, glaring down their barrels at me. For the moment, though, my problems seemed remote.

Grasping Jill’s hand, I strolled beside her out to where our group stood on a large open plaza. Clustered around us were entertainment places, restaurants, an art gallery and one of
Israel
’s countless churches named for Simon Peter, the Galilean fisherman Jesus chose to lead the early Christians. We were mostly seniors, on a tour organized by our Sunday School class from
Gethsemane
United
Methodist
Church
in
Nashville
. I would give long odds that we had not missed a single St. Peter’s since our arrival on a hot November morning two weeks ago. Some had questioned our sanity in traveling to this battleground of the Jews and Palestinians. But we had landed during a lull in the unpleasantness.

By now the weather had cooled, making my yellow cardigan feel good when we started out from Netanya after breakfast. But the sun was nudging the mercury toward a high in the seventies. I was pulling off the sweater when I heard a cheery voice from nearby.

“Hey, Greg!”

Sam Gannon strolled over, pointing across the plaza. “You won’t believe what I saw in that gallery over there.”

“What?”

Gannon stands half a head taller than my five-foot ten, and he’s depressingly slim while I bulge in all the wrong places.

“I just peeked in the doorway,” he said, “and saw this painting of an old C-47 in the desert. Boy, I haven’t been in one of those jewels in many a year.”

A retired multi-engine Air Force driver, Sam had been the point man in organizing this trip to
Israel
and
Jordan
.

I glanced at my wife. “I’m glad it was just a painting. If it was real, she’d probably want to buy it.”

Jill smiled. “A C-47
would
look nice in the backyard.”

I should point out that I am also a retired Air Force officer, but not a flier. I spent my time in the
OSI
–Office of Special Investigations. I pursued such evils as overpriced wrenches and stolen toilet paper, plus chasing down drug-pushing airmen, communist spies and terrorist groups that posed a threat to Air Force personnel and installations. Jill was the pilot in the family. She had held a commercial license for many years, once running her own charter service.

Just then two scruffy looking boys came racing across the plaza on bicycles, jabbering away in Arabic and paying no attention to where they were going. One of them cut just in front of the tour group and the other skidded to a halt, nearly colliding with Jill.

“Idiot!” I shouted.

I stepped around Jill in a move toward the boy.

She grabbed my arm as he stood there, glaring. “Cool it, Greg.”

“Damned juvenile,” I muttered. As I spoke, the boy peddled away at full speed.

During my
OSI
days I was noted for a volatile temper. Retirement and Jill’s patience had mellowed my disposition. But my troubles with the
Nashville
cops, plus the burden of no smokes, had begun to trigger old habits. As a voice called out at the front of the group, I caught Jill casting me an unhappy glance.

“Okay, people,” our tour guide said. “You have about twenty minutes to look around, shop, whatever. Then we have to be back on the bus. We’ll drive through some of Tel Aviv, then head toward
Jerusalem
.”

Jacob Cohen gestured to the southeast with the long olive wood walking stick he referred to as his “staff.” Ever quick with the pun, he had introduced the stick at the start of the trip with, “Thy rod, my staff–a little Twenty-third Psalm humor.” Originally from
New York
, Cohen had lived in
Israel
the past twenty years. He looked a typical bearded synagogue worshiper. Unlike most Israelis, however, he was a Messianic Jew, a member of a congregation that believed in Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah. He was also a walking encyclopedia of the Bible.

I remembered something I needed to take care of and moved over to where Cohen stood with two of the younger women. They were gazing at the towering spire atop the Franciscan Monastery of Saint Peter.

“Jake, you were going to give me the name of your Messianic Jewish friend in
Nashville
,” I said. “You’d better do it now before I forget.”

He rummaged around in his shirt pocket. “Sorry about that kid on the bike. Some of them don’t have much respect for their elders.” He pulled out a scrap of paper. “Okay, it’s David Wolfson. Here’s his name and phone number.”

“You said he was a computer nut? I might get him to give me some advice on an upgrade.”

“He’s good with advice. Another ex-New Yorker. Funny thing, his father was an Orthodox rabbi. They had a pretty heavy falling out when Jake turned Messianic. He inherited some of his dad’s biblical curiosity, though. He’s into all this Bible codes stuff.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “Bible codes? Never heard of it.”

“It has to do with the letters in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Supposedly concerns hidden messages God placed in the text. It’s too far-fetched for me. I guess it came natural to David, though. He was a computer hacker in college. Then he went legit and signed with the National Security Agency.”

Jill grabbed my arm. “You look calmer, thank goodness. Let’s head on toward the bus. Look at Wilma over there at that van. I’ll bet she’s buying more knickknacks.”

A dusty gray minivan had parked not far behind our red and white Middle East Tours bus. Its tailgate was swung up, displaying an array of olive wood figures and other trinkets. Dealers like this made us run a gauntlet to reach the bus. At our hotel in
East Jerusalem
, a Palestinian had greeted the ladies out front each morning, peddling souvenirs from the trunk of his car.

As we paused beside Sam Gannon’s wife, Wilma, another tour bus edged past. It fouled the air with its diesel exhaust. I fanned the stench away with my Titans cap. Just then a husky man with black hair and a black beard approached me. He wore a dark suit, no tie. He had a round face and white teeth.