Serpent of Moses (16 page)

“Excuse me,” she finally said and, grabbing the younger woman by her elbow, disappeared back down the stairs.

“Well, now she has a story to tell when she gets back home,” Romero said.

Espy didn’t answer but found that the incident had left a smile on her face. As she turned back to the panels that had tantalized but ultimately disappointed her, her spirits were higher. She decided to enjoy the moment, to appreciate the fact that she was in another part of the world, in one of the most extraordinary buildings she’d ever seen, and had stumbled onto a clue left by an artisan almost four hundred years ago. When considered in those terms, she was rather pleased with their progress. Too, the last choir loft still remained to be searched and might yield something they could use.

She was about to suggest that to Romero when something about the design on the panels struck her in a way it hadn’t before they’d been interrupted. At first she couldn’t figure out what it was about the semicircle design that bothered her and she tried examining it from afar piece by piece. When that yielded nothing, she changed her focus, trying to take in all of it at once. How long she remained like that, absorbing the panels as a single unit, she didn’t know, except that when she emerged from it, when what had been pressing itself upon her suddenly clicked and she snapped to alertness, she found her brother watching her.

Rather than saying anything, Espy rose and walked over to the loft wall, placing her hands on the rail and peering down at the lower level of the cathedral, toward the dais that had so intrigued her earlier. After committing its shape and basic features to memory, she moved back and studied the panel walls. She did this twice more, and by that time Romero had reclaimed his feet, though he knew better than to interrupt.

When she’d satisfied herself that she was on the right track, she turned her attention to Romero.

“It’s a representation of the dais in front of the altar,” she said, pointing at the outline. “While al-Idrisi didn’t reproduce the pictures from each of the stones, you can see where he identified the edges.”

She watched as Romero studied the panels with new eyes, and then as he performed the same back and forth dance she’d done.

“Okay, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “Now, what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. But it can’t be coincidence that the alchemy symbol sits right in the middle of one of the stone block segments.”

Espy went back to the alchemy symbol, knowing she would have to return to the dais to see if the stone represented on the panel held the same symbol. Letting her fingers trace the lines of the outer box, she was surprised when a word popped into her head, coming as if from nowhere. And as she considered the word, she was even more surprised by the fact that it was neither Spanish nor English.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

“What is it?” Romero asked, but Espy shushed him.

Pulling back her hand, she looked at the ornate outline in a new light, working to separate the words from the unnecessary line that gave it the appearance of trim. It took some time; after all, the language had been extinct for hundreds of years. But after some trial and error, she was convinced she had it.

“It’s Gafat,” she said.

Romero looked at the panel and then back at his sister.

“I’ve asked you not to curse at me in foreign languages,” he said.

“It’s a language that went extinct in the mid-seventeenth century,” Espy said. “About forty years after al-Idrisi carved this.” At Romero’s incredulous look, she shrugged and explained, “It’s a Semitic language, so the basic structure isn’t hard to identify if you know what you’re looking for.”

“What does it say, then?” Romero asked, sounding unconvinced.

Espy turned to the panel and used her finger to point out the message. “Two parts; two steps.”

He frowned. “And that means . . . ?”

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “But I’m going to head over to the other loft and see what I can find.”

Less than ten minutes later, they had another symbol, different from the first, and even Romero was unable to provide it with a meaning. The words around this symbol, though, were the same as those around the first. Having exhausted their well of ideas, they descended the narrow stairs and headed straight to the dais, where they were pleased to discover that the symbols on the stall panels matched the positions of their marble cousins. They studied the dais for a long while, trying to determine how to use the information but came up with nothing. Espy, seeing a priest walking up the far aisle, hurried to corral him.

“Excuse me,” she said in Italian. “Could I ask you a few questions about the dais over there?”

The priest smiled and followed her over to where Romero waited.

“Can you tell me about these symbols?” she asked.

She had hardly finished the question before the priest began to answer, causing Espy to believe that hers was not the first inquiry into the nature of the designs.

“In each of the smaller naves, you will see sarcophagi for some of the duomo’s prominent saints,” he said. “This monument was installed after the last interment—that of Archbishop da Intimiano. The symbols you see here are also found on the sarcophagi.”

Espy nodded. “And is each symbol on each sarcophagus? Or is each combination of symbols unique to the deceased?”

“While several of the symbols are used on more than one of the tombs, the combinations are all unique,” he said. “But to the best of my knowledge, the symbols do not represent anything beyond the whims of those who designed them.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate the information.”

They waited for the priest to leave before speaking again.

“We treat it as a road map,” Romero said. “My guess is that only one of the tombs will have both symbols.”

The layout of the cathedral made for quick work, and they found the sarcophagus they were looking for on the third try. To be thorough, they examined the fourth and last tomb as well to be sure the one they’d selected was indeed the only one with both symbols in the stone.

As they moved around the tomb of the Archbishop Ottone Visconti, the two symbols assigned an unobtrusive spot on the lid at the position where Romero suspected the man’s feet to be, they worked to determine what the symbols and their positions meant—and if the other tomb markings and adornments were tied together. But with no point of reference, nothing to give them direction, they foundered.

“There are several symbols along this side of the lid and lower, along the containment vessel here,” Romero said, gesturing. He pointed at one in particular. “This one is on Intimiano’s tomb but in a different spot.”

“So position is a clue,” Espy said.

Romero nodded, but slowly, as if his thoughts had suddenly gone somewhere else. As Espy watched, Romero retrieved his phone and began to scan through the pictures he’d taken of the symbols around the dais. When he’d cycled through them, he frowned.

“This one here,” he said, pointing at a symbol on the side of the tomb. “This one does not appear on the dais.”

“Are you sure?”

Romero didn’t answer. Instead, he muttered, “I need a pen.” He pulled the cathedral guide from his pocket. While Espy looked among her belongings for a pen, Romero unfolded the guide until he found a panel with white space. Taking the pen from Espy, he quickly drew one of the symbols and then, after studying the sarcophagus for a moment, he drew the second symbol directly over the first. When he finished, he held the paper out for Espy’s inspection.

The result of Romero’s efforts was a near-perfect representation of the symbol that was not on the dais.

“I knew there was a reason I brought you along,” Espy said.

She knelt down and began to trace along the outer edge of the new symbol. A moment later, she looked up.

“It’s not Gafat,” she said. “It’s Latin. Two words. The first is—I’m not sure I’m reading this right—
Nehushtan
? The second is easier:
Cyrene
.”

“Cyrene is the name of a Greek settlement. I’ve sold pottery recovered from the ruins there.” He shook his head and aimed a wry smile at Espy. “It’s in Libya.”

The smile the two shared was one of satisfaction, but floating along the edges of that feeling was the ugly fact that knowing Jack had gone to Libya was not the revelation they’d hoped for. However, there was still the promise of the second word.

“Any idea what
Nehushtan
means?”

Romero could only respond with a shake of his head.

“Give me a minute,” he said, pulling his phone out again. It took what seemed a long while to Espy before Romero could establish an Internet connection and find any information about what they’d uncovered. When he did, he released a low whistle. “I know now what Jack’s searching for. And why Sturdivant wouldn’t tell us even after I threatened to fly there and present a convincing argument.”

He handed his phone over to Espy, who brought it close so she could read the small screen.

“You’re kidding . . .”

“I never knew the name for it,” Romero said.

“You’re kidding,” Espy repeated.

“I think we’ve covered that,” he said, reaching for the phone. “According to legend, it had the power to heal snakebites.”

“I remember,” Espy said. “I was the one who always paid attention in Sunday school.”

Romero chuckled but the laughter faded quickly. “Does your boyfriend ever do anything that doesn’t have quite so dramatic a flair?”

Esperanza knew that the question was meant to be lighthearted, but it had a sobering effect. Now that she knew what Jack was after, she felt an iciness grip her insides. There were simply too many similarities to the last time Jack had gone after a biblical artifact. And since she couldn’t reach him, she couldn’t help but imagine a number of horrible possibilities.

Her brother didn’t have to rely on their familial relationship to understand that his normally strong sister was falling into a dark place, and he did the only thing a brother could do. He reached out and drew her into a hug that all but enveloped her. When a few moments later he released his embrace, tears were trailing down her cheeks.

Yet her eyes held a smile. Stepping back from Romero, she nodded her thanks and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“So what now?” she asked.

“We study,” he said. “We build on what your friend Duckey is doing in Al Bayda and we figure out what happened to Jack once he reached the ruins.”

“Okay,” she said. “But I think we need to be prepared to accept that Jack had to know more than he learned here. Or what he learned here provided him with a specific plan of action we know nothing about right now.”

Romero nodded and turned to leave.

Espy absorbed her own words, considering the difficulties posed by their imperfect understanding of Jack’s profession. Then, as she pondered that, something occurred to her. “What about the Gafat text?”

Romero turned back around. “What about it?”

“It wasn’t necessary to use the text to find this symbol,” she said. “So why put it there?”

He shrugged. “What did it say?”

“Two parts; two steps.”

Espy went to the tomb, stopping in front of the symbol they’d just discovered. Using that one as a starting point, she found the symbol two spaces to the right. It was a representation of one of the symbols on the dais and was absent of any writing around its outer edge. She tried again, this time moving left, and landed on a symbol she was reasonably certain she’d not yet seen. It was surrounded with the markings of the dead language.

It took her longer than it had with the Latin, but when she looked up at Romero, her face was flushed.

“It says
Cyme
,” she said.

“Are you sure it doesn’t say
Cyrene
?” Romero asked.

“It’s Cyme,” she repeated.

“Alright, Cyme it is. So what does it mean?”

Espy stood and stepped back from the sarcophagus, wiping her hands on her pant legs. “Two parts; two steps.”

She and Romero pondered the mystery for a while as tourists shuffled around them, some of them coming near to take pictures of the tomb, oblivious to what it had just revealed to the Venezuelans.

“Doesn’t the Bible say that Hezekiah destroyed this pole?” Romero asked.

“Supposedly people were praying to it and so he had it destroyed,” Espy affirmed. “But if Jack is looking for it, and if the effort that went into these clues is any indication, I’d say that Hezekiah wasn’t successful in destroying it.”

“Unless . . . he didn’t destroy it completely. What if he broke it, perhaps in two pieces?”

“Two parts; two steps,” Espy said, excitement in her voice.

“Two parts; two steps,” Romero agreed.

Espy’s eyes widened.

“Jack wouldn’t have known.” At Romero’s questioning look she explained, “He wouldn’t have seen the Gafat. He wouldn’t have known there was a second symbol.”

“And so even if he finds it, he will have only found a portion of it.”

“If he’s in any position to find it,” Espy said quietly.

Romero had no response for that, and Espy, despite what they’d accomplished, felt her mood darken.

As Duckey mounted the single flight of narrow wooden steps to his room, he tried to think of a time when he felt wearier than he did at that moment and found himself hard-pressed to do so. Waking up that morning, he’d followed a few more leads, but after nothing panned out he’d caught a cab to the Al Bayda university district and had spent much of the afternoon questioning students about things to see and do in and around the city—especially those things that might require a motorbike to reach. He’d reasoned that, regardless of nationality, college students were adventurous compared to most other demographic groups. Too, they would be plugged in to their surroundings; they could narrow Duckey’s search quicker than he could ever hope to accomplish on his own.

The jury was still out on whether his stroll around campus had been an efficient use of time. The students he’d talked with had given him a great deal of information, though he had to parse all of it against what he knew of Jack. He hoped, once he could think about things in the morning with a clearer head, he could make a connection worth investigating.

His room was at the end of a dark hallway, and while it wasn’t the Ritz, the bed was large and comfortable. Once inside, he dropped onto the bed with a grunt, removed his shoes, and leaned back against the headboard to relax a little. A cigar and a scotch would have helped him achieve that state, but on his side of the closed door was a sign in Arabic that he didn’t have to be able to read to know that it warned him against lighting up on the premises. The picture of a cigarette with a red X through it transcended all difficulties with the written word. As far as the scotch, Libya was a dry country, and Duckey had no interest in getting dragged off to a Libyan prison by the country’s version of Eliot Ness.

Even so, it felt good to lie down and allow the strain of the day to slide away. Before allowing himself to drift off, however, he decided to discharge one last duty and then call it a night. Fishing his phone from his pocket, he found Espy’s number and dialed. When he brought the phone to his ear, he didn’t hear the customary sounds his phone made when attempting to make the connection. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the display, surprised to see that he was in a dead zone with not even the hint of a bar to offer encouragement.

He hadn’t used the phone at all that day, except to check the time, and so he didn’t know if the lack of a signal was common to Al Bayda or just his hotel room. Regardless, his legs ached at the thought of heading out into the street to try to get a signal. Instead, he set the phone on the nightstand and reached for the room phone—a canary-yellow rotary phone, something he hadn’t seen in over a decade.

While spinning the dial for the last in a long series of digits, he chose not to think about how much the call would cost him.

“Hello . . . ?”

“Esperanza, it’s me—Duckey.”

“I tried to call you a few minutes ago,” she said, and what struck Duckey was how good it was to hear her voice, which he thought strange considering he’d never met the woman.

“I’m in my hotel room and it looks like I can’t get cell service here.”

“You found the one hotel in Tripoli without cell service?”

“Nope. I found the only hotel in
Al Bayda
without service,” he corrected.

“Al Bayda?”

Duckey explained the interview with the Alamo clerk that had resulted in an abbreviated stay in the Libyan capital, then gave an overview of what he’d found out since arriving in Al Bayda—an update truncated by his having not learned as much as he’d hoped by now.

As he spoke, he sensed an impatient energy coming from the other end of the line—even with the high level of static coming through an old rotary phone in a cheap hotel in an African city. Consequently, when he finished and Espy jumped in without a pause, he was neither surprised nor offended that his efforts had been summarily glossed over.

“I know what he’s looking for,” she said with obvious triumph.

“Come again?”

“I know why Jack went to Libya. I know what he was going to sell to Sturdivant.”

Throughout Espy’s pronouncement her voice grew louder, and Duckey noticed how the excitement brought out the Spanish flavor in her English. He pulled the phone away from his ear, only returning it when he felt that doing so would not burst his eardrum.

It occurred to him then that his immediate reaction to the news wasn’t what he would have expected. Of course there was a level of pleasure at hearing the news, but Duckey also recognized a small amount of disappointment—envy, perhaps, that Esperanza and her brother had accomplished a good deal more than he had.

“Don’t worry,” Espy said. “From what I can tell, at least a portion of the staff is in Libya—near Al Bayda, in fact—which makes you our man on the ground now.”

“The staff?”

“That’s what he’s after,” Espy said. “He was looking for a staff mentioned in the Bible. It’s called the Nehushtan.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Didn’t your parents take you to Sunday school?”

“They didn’t serve Bloody Marys in church,” Duckey said.

“A shame,” she said. “Well, the Nehushtan was a pole with a brass snake on it. According to the Bible, Moses made it to heal people of bites from a plague of snakes God sent them.”

Duckey was well aware that the abbreviated account Espy had just provided was likely leaving out crucial details—things that might have made the whole thing sound much less absurd.

“Let’s back up a minute,” he said. “God sent snakes to kill people and then changed his mind. But instead of just taking the snakes away, he has someone construct a snake totem to heal the people from snakebites?”

“That’s right,” Espy said, though her answer was slow in coming.

“Never mind the fact that while Moses—or his smithy—spent however many hours it took to make this fake snake, the real ones kept slithering around and biting people?”

“I suppose, yes . . .”

“Then there’s the fact that one of God’s biggest commandments—from what I remember, it was something he felt pretty strongly about—was that the Israelites weren’t supposed to make any idols. But then he tells them to put a snake on a pole, have people pray to it, and voilà!”

“I don’t think they actually prayed to it,” Espy said, and yet Duckey’s questions had taken the confidence from her voice.

Duckey blew out a deep breath, his exasperation all theater. “I guess it has to be true. I don’t think you can make stuff like that up.”

The silence that greeted him was one he couldn’t qualify. And as it dragged on, he began to wonder if Espy had taken genuine offense at his irreverence. He was about to issue a mild
mea culpa
when she responded.

“It’s amazing how much you sound like Jack,” she said.

“Completely uncalled for,” Duckey said, imagining the smile on Espy’s face.

“I’m not afraid to pull out the big guns if you’re going to get feisty with me,” she warned.

“Point taken. Now, where were we?”

“We were in Libya, where it seems there’s a biblical artifact waiting to be discovered.”

“A brass snake pole,” Duckey said.

“A brass snake pole,” she agreed.

Duckey nodded to himself. “So Jack finds a clue in Milan that leads him to Al Bayda, Libya, and after he gets here, he just disappears?”

“No one just disappears, Duckey.”

“Normally I’d agree with you. But this is Jack we’re talking about. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

Espy had to chuckle at that.

“Haven’t you and Jack been down this road before? A few years ago, the two of you went after a biblical artifact and it almost got you killed.”

“Apples to oranges,” Espy said. “For one thing, I don’t know of any super secret organization that would kill to keep the Nehushtan from being discovered.”

“If there was a super secret organization, you probably wouldn’t know about it,” he reminded her.

“Another difference,” she went on, ignoring him, “is that I’m not with him this time.”

Both were valid points, and Duckey wondered if the years spent in higher education had simply left him soft. Before he’d retired, he wouldn’t have balked at a dangerous assignment. Of course the difference was that Jack was his friend and was the one in harm’s way.

“So what now?” he asked.

“It’s up to you,” Espy said. “We’ve confirmed the reason Jack went to Libya. Now you have to figure out what happened after he got there—if he even made it to Cyrene.”

“How did we get from Al Bayda to Cyrene?”

Espy explained and Duckey stayed silent as she did so. He learned about the Greek ruins near the city he was in, and about the potential second piece of the staff that might be somewhere else entirely.

“You couldn’t make this complicated?” Duckey asked.

Ignoring the comment, Espy said, “Romero and I are on our way. I’ll call you when we reach Tripoli.”

“You’re not going to this other place, what did you call it? Cyme?”

“We thought about it, but this is about finding Jack, not hunting for treasure.”

Up to now, Duckey had been twirling the phone cord while he talked with Espy. He saw the phone beginning to slide across the table. Releasing the cord, he watched as it unraveled between the table and the bed on which he sat. When the cord stopped unwinding, he leaned toward the table to push the phone back. It was from that position that he saw the small wire protruding from beneath it.

The instant he saw it, he froze. Then, after taking a short time to consider the implications of that one wire, he straightened and, with no change in the tone of his voice, exchanged a few parting pleasantries with Espy before ending the call. When he heard a dial tone, he used his finger to depress the cradle sensor. Setting the handset on his lap, he used his free hand to retrieve the TV remote control from the table, placing it across the cradle so he could remove his hand without reengaging the dial tone. That done, he picked up the handset and studied the mouthpiece.

As he peered through the holes, he saw nothing, so he unscrewed the cap, noticing it came apart a bit easier than one on a phone that old should have. When the cap came off, he didn’t have to rely on his Company training to see the small chip-like thing that shouldn’t have been there. After a snort of irritation, he set the partially dismantled handset on the table.

So they were bugging his calls. It made him wonder about the dead spot—if perhaps the Libyans were using some kind of dampening technology to kill the signal to his cellphone. Anyone could buy one online. For while the range wasn’t wide, it was effective for a room the size of Duckey’s.

He rose from the bed and walked over to the window, looking down at the street that ran in front of the hotel. The sun had long since disappeared, but he could see well enough to spot three cars parked across from the hotel. One was an old Dodge Caravan and he ignored that. The other two, though, were possibles. One was a dark sedan that he hadn’t remembered seeing there when he’d returned to his hotel; the other was a decade-old SUV with tinted windows. His gut told him there were men in both, despite the fact that their assigning multiple agents to keep an eye on a middle-aged retired spy—who was only in the country to look for a friend—seemed like overkill.

He ran a hand through his hair, allowed the curtain to fall back into place, and walked back to the bed. What concerned him more than the agents parked out front was that they’d heard his call with Espy in its entirety. But even as he thought about it, he wondered what they would make of it. It would have been clear to anyone listening that the mission Duckey was on had nothing to do with the American government. Still, when it came to international politics, there was no way of telling how the Libyans would react. For all Duckey knew, they might assume the whole conversation was encoded and Duckey had passed crucial information to other agents.

Depending on the type and sensitivity of their equipment, they might have figured out that Duckey had discovered their bug. With that in mind, he returned to the curtain to see if he could spot any movement. Whether it was the fact that he’d looked out the window twice in the last few minutes or that he was right and they’d picked up on his tampering with the surveillance equipment, he saw the door of the dark sedan open.

The man who stepped out was wearing dark pants and a white shirt. No coat and no tie, as would have been standard CIA dress code. Yet even in the dim lighting, Duckey picked up on the sense of authority the man gave off.

Then the doors of the SUV opened, and two men, both looking like the one who’d exited the sedan, joined the first man. Together the trio crossed the street, heading for the hotel.

Duckey stood frozen for as long as it took for his dormant training to kick in. Hurrying toward the foot of the bed, he grabbed his suitcase, thankful he hadn’t unpacked anything, and then moved to the door. Once in the hallway, he paused and looked toward the steps leading down to what passed for a lobby but knew he wouldn’t make it down before the agents stepped into the hotel. To his right was the fire exit, with the large, boxy sensor attached to the release, but then Duckey saw the cut wires sticking out from the bottom of the box and guessed the door hadn’t been used for its intended purpose in a long while.