The Sacred Cipher (48 page)

The cigarette smoke hanging in the air between Sharp and Orhlon failed to obscure
the serious nature of their situation. And its absence, when cleared by the heavy-duty
ventilating system of Central Command, failed to reveal any solutions.

“Levi, this is one awful mess,” said the general, as he squashed another butt into
the already-full ashtray. “These guys have been under the Mount for thirty-six hours,
God knows doing what, and we sit here scratching.”

Orhlon got up and went to the sideboard, pouring more black coffee into his mug. Returning
to the table, he lit another cigarette before his khakis hit the chair.

“The prime minister hasn’t given us clearance to launch any action that might take
us under the Mount.”

A young aide came into the room and handed a single sheet of paper to Sharp while
Orhlon emptied half his coffee mug in a thunderous gulp.

“Other than that, we don’t know squat about who these guys are, what they’re doing
here, what they’re planning, or what’s going to blow up in our faces in the next two
seconds. That’s a real comforting record for an intelligence service. Make sure Gefen
knows to call us.”

Orhlon was putting another butt to death when he felt Sharp’s eyes.
Now what?

“General, we’ve identified the truck. It was stolen from a tobacco farmer—”

“Yeah, between here and Kibbutz Tzuba, right?”

“Yessir. But, sir, we’ve also found two bodies. Arabs, each stabbed through the neck,
their bodies were dumped in heavy undergrowth along the road down by the King’s Garden.”

Orhlon sat up straight, his chair turned toward Sharp. “Murderers, have our boys become
murderers? Have they always been murderers?” Orhlon’s mind tripped quickly into a
more heightened state of alert. If he and Sharp had been facing a potential crisis
before, now they were facing the real possibility of massive disaster.
These guys didn’t shy away from taking two lives, so they won’t shy away from taking
thousands more
.

“General,” said Sharp, snapping Orhlon out of his thoughts, “that’s not all. We found
the garden guide in the bus station in Tel Aviv.”

“The GPS is absolutely useless,” said Johnson. “I don’t have a clue where we are,
but I believe we have been moving closer to the Mount.”

Not much of a consolation
, thought Bohannon. Just then, Rodriguez popped back out of the tunnel they had followed
into this underground prison.

“It would take us hours to get back up that tunnel,” he said matter-of-factly, “if
we could make it at all. It would be very, very difficult with these packs. Besides,
what would we be going back to? All the way to the cavern of the arches? No, gentlemen.
If we decide to go back, we’ve got to ditch the packs here. We’ll never get up the
shaft with them. We ditch the packs, then we’ve got to keep walking right out of the
tombs. This chase is all over, and we’ll probably have some type of welcoming committee
waiting for us once we emerge above ground.”

Rodriguez’s words were daggers, piercing hope, uncovering their fear. Lost? Stranded?
Sentenced to death? Was this their tomb?

Bohannon broke the black spell.

“Okay, if we can’t go back, we’ve got to get across. How can we do that?”

Sammy Rizzo was exiting the men’s room, having replaced his dripping bandages and
having swallowed half-a-dozen aspirin to kill the pain, when his New York radar locked
on the advancing soldiers. Rizzo, heart pounding, slipped behind a rotating magazine
tower and watched from behind the pages of a Jewish “monster chopper” magazine.

Kallie was cool, he had to admit. As the four khaki-clad men converged on her, she
managed to kick his pack deep under the bench. As they grasped her under the arms,
she never cast a glance back toward the men’s room. As they escorted her out the side
door, carrying away only one pack, Rizzo replaced the magazine and slowly walked out
the opposite door.

He found an unoccupied bench deep in the shadows out of the sun and gave himself ten
minutes to think. He had his passport and his wallet on him, and not much else. The
extra bandages were in his pack with his clothes, but the bus tickets were in her
bag. When they searched her bag, they would know somebody was with her.

Calm down, Rizman
, he coaxed himself.
This is a chess game. Play the game
.

Rizzo took a deep breath and resisted the demands of his body to lie down and rest.
What is the last move and what is the first move? You are no John Wayne, especially
with this arm, so you are not going to rescue Kallie
. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that fantasy.
You are also unlikely to make it past the Israeli border patrol, unlikely to make
it out of this bus station if you don’t wise up. The guys are in Jerusalem. If they
were to somehow escape from Israel, they would do it from Jerusalem. The soldiers
will be taking Kallie to Jerusalem, where else? She’ll probably get grilled by their
toughest thugs, particularly if our guys got under the Mount. It’s all going to happen
from Jerusalem
.

You’re not getting out of Israel, anyway
, Rizzo told himself.
The spooks don’t know you exist yet. When they do, the first places they’ll look are
the border crossings. No, you’ve got to make like a banana and split
.

Another deep breath, and Rizzo gingerly lowered himself from the bench. “Get back
to Jerusalem,” he murmured as he walked back into the station. “Maybe you can be of
some help.”

Rizzo beat a straight line to the benches where he and Kallie had been sitting not
that long before. An elderly woman was sitting there now, a babushka wrapped tightly
around her hair, framing her leather-cured wrinkles. Rizzo stopped directly in front
of the old woman, put his fists on his hips and peppered her with a withering stare
of accusation.

“Israeli mafia, is that it?”

Somebody’s grandmother opened her eyes in alarm and her mouth in protest.
“Vos iz?
”

“No you don’t,” Rizzo short-circuited, increasing his volume. He didn’t know what
language she was speaking, but it wasn’t going to stop him. “Did you really think
you could steal my backpack? Is that the scam, use old widows as diversion while you
rip off the handicapped, huh? Is that what you’re up to?”

Grandmother shook her head, raised her hands, palms up, and looked around for help.
“
Farshteyn?
” she said to Rizzo.
“Fregt mikh bekheyrem.”

“What kind of country is this,” Rizzo shouted, his left arm sweeping across the room,
“where you prey on the maimed and the infirmed?”

Grandmother was aghast, all wide-open mouth, wide-open eyes. “
Idiot!
”

It didn’t sound the same, but Rizzo understood that one. Time to vamoose. “Gimme back
my bag!” Rizzo scuttled under the bench and emerged with his backpack on the other
side. “This is a disgrace. I’m going to get some help.”

He exited the same rear door, leaving only a memory and a shaken grandma in his wake.

Four well-armed soldiers led Kallie out of Central Command’s conference room. She
was weeping, headed to a waiting armored personnel carrier that would take her, under
escort, to the military prison at Sha’ves Poser, six miles south of Jerusalem.

Orhlon watched her back retreat out the door.

“General, we’ve got to verify this; we’ve got to verify or discredit this story right
away,” said Sharp.

Orhlon watched the door close.

“General . . . ?”

Orhlon got out of his chair, stretched like a lion exiting its cave after a long sleep,
and moved slowly to the coffeepot. He picked out a new mug, ignoring the half-filled
one he had abandoned on the table, and absently began stirring sugar into the dark
liquid. Seeing the spoon in the mug sent a signal to his brain, bypassing the roadblock
that momentarily held his thoughts captive. Orhlon turned back to the table and, as
he sat, put aside the new mug and retrieved the old.

“No, Levi, we are well beyond verification.” He drew heavily on a newly lit cigarette.
“Why would those men come here? Why would they have risked what they have risked,
endured what they have endured, persisted the way they have persisted, if they didn’t
believe the scroll was authentic and the message was valid? And who is after them,
besides the Northern Islamic Front? Who killed their partner in New York City? No,
this is no prank, no attempt for cheap publicity. Trying to verify it would just bring
too many other people into the loop.”

Orhlon looked into his half-full mug of now-cold coffee, still very much in his own
world.

Levi Sharp pushed his chair close to the general. They had known each other since
officers’ school.

“Moishe, if this scroll is true, if these men were to find a temple . . .” Sharp was
at the general’s left, his voice quiet, but strong, “the Arab nations will erupt.
This could be the end, could lead to the ultimate conflict. We know how that will
end, and there is no hope, not for Arab or Jew. We need to act while we still have
the opportunity.”

The general continued to study the liquid in the mug.

“Yes, Levi, yes, it could be the end.” He began to swirl the liquid inside the cup,
genuinely fascinated by the shape of its movement. “Not so bad for an old warhorse
like me,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “But the young. It’s the young, Levi,
the young whose lives weigh heavy on my heart.”

With a whiplike snap of his arm, he hurled the half-full coffee mug at the far wall
and watched it explode on impact.

“Please telephone Lukas and Chaim. I will call the prime minister myself. They must
come here immediately. Nothing else is more important.”