The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (7 page)

“Maybe I’m being paran—”

A man in black appeared at the far end of the aisle. Behind them, from the alley, they heard a whistle.

“Go!”

Rodriguez now in the lead, Bohannon pushed Annie in front of him as they raced across the aisle and dove into the darkness of the alley on the far side. Their pounding feet echoed off the shuttered stalls, but they heard other footsteps, as well.

Bohannon’s brother-in-law was pushing on every door he passed, the former basketball player barely breaking stride. When one door on the right yielded, Rodriguez nearly fell through it.

“Here, quick.”

With his good arm, Bohannon pulled his wife into the darkness that smelled of fish and salt as Rodriguez pushed the door closed behind them and fumbled for the latch.

“We can’t stay—”

Running feet passed the door, Rodriguez’s shoulder keeping it firmly closed.

During the day, and well into most evenings, Jerusalem’s sprawling Machane Yehuda market and its covered aisles overflowed with bodies jockeying to avoid collisions with each other and bulging bags of produce and fish, bread and cheese that hung from the end of almost every arm. Far removed from sunset, it was now Sabbath in Israel and the shops were long closed, the aisles empty, the shadows silent. The running feet had stopped.

“We need to find a way out,” whispered Rodriguez. Pressing the rusted bolt in place, he pulled over a large wooden box that was next to the door and wedged it under the doorknob.

“Over here.”

Bohannon turned in the direction of his wife’s hushed words. Annie stood leaning against another door in the middle of the back wall of the stall. “It’s quiet.”

They huddled together around the metal door. “Probably not a main corridor,” she whispered.

“We’ve got to chance it,” said Bohannon. “They’ll figure out we ducked in somewhere along that alley.”

Annie nodded, turned to the metal door, caressed the bolt to slip it out of its latch, and cracked the door open so Bohannon could peek outside. It was a narrow little passage, barely four feet wide, nearly impenetrable because of stacked crates alternating on either side. “Storage space,” he whispered. “Looks like it runs behind this entire row of shops.”

“A way out?” Annie’s lips brushed his ear.

Someone rattled the other door.

Annie was out first, squeezing her body through the tight space as she moved to the left, uphill, away from the alley. Bohannon followed closely behind and, his hand on her arm, edged around Annie in the dark. He was hoping for an escape route and hoping not to knock over any of the assorted boxes standing in precarious rows.

Ahead of him, the darkness lightened, and Bohannon could see the mouth of the passageway. Twenty feet from the end, he stopped behind four barrels that smelled of pickles and pressed his back against the wall as first Annie and then Joe came to his side.

“That should be Jaffa Road,” Bohannon whispered, tilting his head to the opening. “If there are pedestrians out, they’ll be on Jaffa Road. And there’s the tram.”

“Not this late,” said Joe. “Not on Sabbath.”

“Well, it’s our best chance to get where there are other people. Look, once we break out of this alley—no matter who’s out there—turn right and run downhill. If we can get to Zion Square, to the bottom of Ben Yehuda, there should be pedestrians down there. Maybe we can find a cop.”

Bohannon turned to his left and caught a glimpse of Annie’s eyes through the gloom. “Be careful … and run fast.”

“You run fast.” Annie put her hand on the sling cradling Bohannon’s damaged right arm. “And don’t worry about me. I’ll probably be there first.”

“Well, then tie this thing tighter,” he whispered, turning so she could tighten the sling. His right arm secured against his chest, Bohannon cast one more glance toward the end of the passage, then stepped toward the opening. Like a runner during warm-up, Bohannon stretched his long legs with each step, picking up speed. As he reached the end of the passage, he burst into the street, turned hard to the right and started his downhill sprint, hoping all the hours on his bike would now pay off.

And confusion erupted around him.

Shouts ripped the silence—one from up the hill, another from down the hill, a third behind them. Tom glanced back over his shoulder—Annie was a stride behind, closing fast. A black shape emerged from a darkened alcove on the right, intent on intercepting Bohannon. But Joe flashed by on his right, slammed into the man’s unprotected side, drove him back into the alcove, and kept running.

Annie and Tom now ran side by side. He prayed something would be open on the King George Road.

There was no stopping now, no holding back against the headlong, downhill momentum. If these guys had guns, they were dead. But guns weren’t the Prophet’s Guard’s MO. They were looking for hostages, bargaining chips—not bodies.

As they approached the darkened intersection of the King George V Road, a black van pulled across Jaffa Road, a door slid back, and two more black-clad men jumped into the street.

“Right!”

Joe yanked on Bohannon’s damaged right arm and dragged him under an arch where they bounced off a stone wall. Tom’s vision blurred, he felt sick to his stomach, and his knees started to buckle. “Don’t you dare fall down,” Joe hissed as he propelled Bohannon down the narrow alley into an open courtyard filled with dozens of cats and an acidic assault of feline urine. They ran headlong down the left side of the courtyard, dodging stray bowls of indecipherable matter, and into another alley and across a gravel parking lot before they burst into a small square, thick with hedges and darkened by a copse of huge trees. Joe and Tom collided with a hedge, and were thrown to the ground. Even in his pain-wracked mind, Tom rolled over on his back to get out of Annie’s way.

But Annie wasn’t there. No one was there except Joe. No one followed. They were alone.

She knew … as soon as the black van entered the intersection, slowing down, all her mother’s intuition, all her protective instincts, kicked in. Before the van stopped, Annie Bohannon glimpsed the tiny street opening on her left. She cut left and was sprinting across the four empty lanes of the Jaffa Road when she heard the shout behind her.

“Right!”

Annie’s heart jumped into her throat as she plunged into the narrow, cobblestoned street. She was focused on her feet, determined not to trip on the uneven stones, and frantically trying to remain calm. She was on her own. Tom and Joe were running in the opposite direction. And the men in black were sure to be close behind. No going back now. Escape … she had to find a way to escape … and to get off these cobblestones.

She turned into a passage barely as wide as her shoulders, ran through somebody’s darkened garden, and emerged onto another small street. She darted a look left—and saw the warning sign.

“Please Dress Appropriately in the Me’a She’arim.”

Annie had reached the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’a She’arim, a walled-in community that shunned not only westerners but also other, more secular Jews. Only the ultra-Orthodox with their ironclad dress codes were welcome in this section of Jerusalem. In her form-fitting pants and short-sleeve shirt, Annie realized no door would open to her. But she would be much harder to find in the district’s maze of crisscrossing streets. And the men in black wouldn’t be welcome here, either.

Moving through the shadows, Annie came even with an opening in the wall on the far side of the street. She looked in both directions. The street was empty and silent. She burst from her hiding place. At the same instant, a black shape launched from a shadowed doorway up the street. She heard the running feet, restrained the urge to look, and raced under the arched opening. Just inside the wall, a tree-shaded lane curved down to the right. Annie ran down the lane, turned left into the next opening, sprinted across a small courtyard, turned into a dark opening, and stopped.

Enough.

Annie quickly looked around. In a darkened corner was a large trash bin. She could hide. But hiding was not in her thoughts.

Instead, Annie pulled the round metal lid from the bin and hefted it in her hands. It would do.

She flattened her back against the wall just inside the passageway, waiting. Part of her felt like a fool. But more of her felt determined, felt empowered. She wasn’t going to run anymore.

Soon she heard running feet, the sound growing louder as they approached the entry to the courtyard. Then they stopped.

Her heart beating louder than the man’s steps, Annie struggled to control her breathing. But her hands, and her resolve, were steady. She strained her hearing out of the passageway and into the courtyard. No sound … but a shadow fell across the face of the passage entrance.

She waited, lifted the metal cover, tightening her grip.

The change from shadow to substance was subtle. Had she not been so keenly concentrated on that dark shape, she could have missed it entirely. But it was substance, not shadow, that leaned into the passageway.

With a force that surprised even her, Annie swung the lid down onto the man’s head and shoulders. The thud, and the man’s grunt, echoed down the passageway. The kickback from the lid sent shivers of pain through her wrists. But it was the crack of bone that turned her stomach. The man in black lay crumpled at her feet. Annie leaned back against the wall, looked hopefully along the length of the passageway, and was about to drop the lid and run, when she heard the noise. More feet running … voices this time. Getting closer.

She pressed back into the dark, felt the lid slip in her perspiring hands. Then realized the black-clad man’s body was half in, half out of the passageway entrance.

Annie hesitated.
I should pull him in.
But the running feet were in the courtyard.

She raised the lid once more.
Maybe I’ll have one chance. Maybe
…

A shadow fell across the motionless body. Something moved. Annie flexed the muscles in her forearms, braced her legs, and shifted her weight to once again bring the lid down with all the force she could summon.

A whisper. “Annie?”

Tom’s voice. The metal lid slipped from her grasp as she tried to stop its momentum. It clanged against the far wall.

“Annie!”

He was over the fallen body before she could react, hugged her tight with his one good arm. “Annie.”

She pulled back to catch her breath. “How did you find me?”

Joe ducked under the arch and stepped over the body. “Good work. But no time for explanations.” Rodriguez put his hands on their shoulders and urged them farther into the passageway. “C’mon. They’re still looking. We’re not out of this yet.”

Running feet echoed off the walls of the passageway as they pressed north, out of the Me’a She’arim. Three pairs of feet, running for safety.

11:06 p.m. Fordow nuclear labs, Iran

Mohsen Kolabi closed the door to the maintenance closet and put his weight behind the overloaded metal cart. On the level below him, the insolent North Korean scientists still worked at a feverish pitch, trying to bring the last centrifuge cascade online. But up here, the level with the testing labs and administrative offices, the lights were dim and the corridors quiet.

Administrators at Fordow didn’t work the night shift. Just maintenance men, the many guard posts, and rude North Koreans in lab coats.

The uranium enrichment plant at Fordow, operational in 2011, was a series of chambers on multiple levels, built into the side of a mountain just outside the sacred city of Qom. The facility was comprised of multiple blast-proof doors; hardened, double-concrete ceilings with earth in between; and twenty-centimeter-thick concrete walls. All of it burrowed under the protection of ninety meters of mountain. The Iranians considered it impenetrable.

Mohsen Kolabi had this level and one more to finish. He strained to move the cart across the uneven, gray-painted concrete floor, down the long, gray-painted corridor between the darkened labs. He came up to where he had left his stepladder propped against a wall, just under the huge photo of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Ghorbani.

He opened the opposite door and flipped the light switch for the enrichment lab. The white, plastic sensor on his lapel came to life, pulsing with sickly, yellow light. Warning. Kolabi carried his stepladder into the lab, then went back and hauled the heavy cart into the room, closing the door and closing his mind to the meaning of the warning light. It was too late for him, anyway. His cousin, the doctor, told him there was no hope. But his family? His six children? Who would take care of them?

So Kolabi was here in the enrichment lab, working another man’s shift for the extra money—and for the opportunity. The opportunity to take care of his family for the rest of their lives.

Scrawny thin, five feet tall, wisps of salt-and-pepper hair on his round head, Kolabi opened his stepladder under one of the old light fixtures, climbed the rungs with his tool pouch hanging from his right hip, and disconnected the old fixture. The new ones were better. They provided more light with less electricity, yes. But they did not have a very long life span. Not much longer than his.