Serpent of Moses (7 page)

Despite everything Jack had gone through over the last couple of days, a few stood out. One of them involved the different levels of feeling one could experience in one’s wrists. Since leaving the safe house in Libya, his hands had not been absent the rope that bound them. Early on, he’d convinced his captor to at least adjust the bonds so his hands were in front of him. Jack believed the main reason for Martin Templeton’s cooperation was so he wouldn’t have to help the archaeologist do all the things people had to do in order to navigate through the day. He suspected the first bathroom break was the tipping point.

Yet even with his hands in a more comfortable place, they were still bound with coarse rope. Jack had used the new position as an opportunity—or a series of small opportunities—to try and break the bonds. But he’d come to realize that, while Templeton didn’t appear to be the killer the Egyptian was, the man could tie a fantastic knot.

As Jack stared into the complete darkness, he contemplated the events of the past few days and was surprised to find himself feeling calm. In fact, the night was actually quite pleasant. They were camping without a tent, exposed to the elements, but the weather was such that they didn’t need to fear either rain or the cold. The end of Jack’s rope wound around the front seat of the jeep, with Templeton sending another rope around the vehicle’s front tire. Both lines had been tied in such a way that Jack could not reach the end of either with any hope of untying them. Yet Templeton had laid out a sleeping bag for Jack and had taken great pains to make sure his captive was comfortable.

And so, once again, Jack did what he was good at: he settled in and waited.

Nothing he’d experienced thus far could equal the events from a few years ago. After running through that gauntlet, he suspected there was little that could unsettle him. It helped of course that what he and Espy had gone through had clarified much for him—had helped him weigh things of true importance against things that were less so. He hated to reduce things to the metaphysical, but there it was.

Thinking about Esperanza served to distract him, to pull his thoughts from his present surroundings. He wondered what, if anything, she’d done when he failed to check in. He was, by his count, at least three days past the time when he should have concluded his business in London and then caught a plane back to Caracas. He couldn’t help the slight smile he wore at the thought that his multiple past failures at keeping a schedule could now come back to haunt him. Knowing Esperanza as he did, he thought there was just as much chance that she’d wash her hands of him completely as there was that she’d search for him. In truth, were he in her position, Jack thought it unlikely he’d search for himself.

Even as he thought these things, he found the smile still rooted.

“What has you in such good spirits?” Templeton asked.

His captor had rolled out his bag ten feet from Jack, a few feet past where Jack’s bonds would have let him advance.

“Just thinking about someone,” Jack said.

He saw Templeton nod. The man was on his back, hands laced behind his head, watching the stars as if they were poised to reveal some valuable truth to him. The Englishman didn’t say anything right away, and Jack, who had ceased asking questions that wouldn’t be answered, settled back and waited—either for sleep or a continuance of the conversation. After several moments, Templeton revealed his desire to extend the exchange.

“Who is she?”

“What makes you think she’s a she?” Jack said.

“Because when a man is tied to a jeep on the edge of an African desert, I doubt very much that he would be thinking about anything else.”

While Jack had to concede the point, he wasn’t about to give the Englishman more information than the man had shown himself willing to return.

“Help me out here, Martin,” Jack said. “Why are you doing this to me? I mean, if you want to hear me say I’m sorry for trying to snatch the artifact right out from under you, then I’ll say it. I was wrong for trying to take it.”

He tried to gauge if his words had any effect on Templeton, but the man’s expression had not changed.

“I don’t get it,” he said after a while. “You have what you want, and from what I can tell, the large man you knocked unconscious isn’t following you. So why do you need me?”

“I studied archaeology at Oxford,” Templeton said quietly.

“I taught a few classes there,” Jack remarked.

“I know. Right before Egypt—before your brother died.”

A few years ago that kind of statement would have done a number on Jack’s psyche. It was yet another testament to the strength granted by experience, as well as by the God Jack was now firmly convinced had orchestrated it all.

“Why am I here, Martin?”

The question was answered by silence, and after waiting for the Englishman to break it, Jack closed his eyes. He had just started to surrender to sleep when Templeton finally spoke.

“What happened in Australia?” he asked.

Jack couldn’t process the question right away, but it wasn’t because it was entirely unexpected. Rather, the query startled him because it felt as if Templeton was intruding on a dream Jack hadn’t shared with anyone. It was like the Englishman had invaded his thoughts.

“I’ve been in Australia on several occasions,” Jack said. “It’s a great country. Have you ever been to Bondi?”

Templeton smiled. “Three years ago you were teaching at Evanston University. A month later you’re arrested in Australia after a double murder.” Templeton took his eyes off the stars long enough to catch Jack’s eye. “Then all the charges are dropped and you’re gallivanting around the globe as if nothing happened.”

Jack absorbed that and, after a time, grunted an admission to the general accuracy of Templeton’s recounting of events.

“I wouldn’t say
gallivanting.
”

Templeton shrugged.

“Suddenly you were in a cave in Libya trying to steal something from me,” he said. “Call it whatever you want.”

“Fair enough,” Jack said.

“Do you know that the Australian government has a Freedom of Information Department that’s a lot like the American one?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, well, they do. And do you know what I found when I submitted a request for the records involving your case?”

“That they were going to charge you an enormous processing fee?”

“That no such records exist.” Templeton let that hang there a moment before continuing. “It didn’t matter that I could show them news articles that talked about the killings. Or pictures of you in handcuffs. As far as the Australian government was concerned, you were never there.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe they’re just bad at keeping records? Besides, why should you care about what I do with my spare time?”

Jack was growing used to the long pauses in his conversations with the Englishman, but there was something different about the one that followed his question. He could sense the iciness coming from Templeton’s direction, could feel that he’d said something that had changed the man’s mood as if flipping a switch. And he could tell that the new emotional state was not one he wanted Templeton to act on.

“Let’s just say that I’ve always been intrigued by puzzles,” Templeton answered.

And with that, he closed his eyes and didn’t speak again.

Imolene had to give the shopkeeper credit. The Yugo had lasted far longer than he would have thought possible, carrying him well past Al Bayda and toward Tripoli. He’d chosen to retain the vehicle when, in stopping in Al Bayda to check in with those who knew most of what went on in the city, he’d learned that two men matching Templeton’s and Hawthorne’s description had passed through there, ostensibly aiming toward the capital. And so Imolene had decided to hang on to the Yugo rather than use up precious time in finding a different vehicle. He was also lower on funds than he liked, and until he caught up to his quarry, he had to make his money stretch.

In Tripoli, the tracking had become much more difficult. It took Imolene some time to conclude it was because the pair had not stopped within the city. That was the only explanation he could come up with that would explain their absence from any of the places Templeton may have gone to procure supplies, or from the notice of those charged with monitoring the city’s ingress and egress of outsiders.

He had not gone all in on the idea. In a city as large as Tripoli, Imolene thought it possible that Templeton and Hawthorne had arrived two days ago and not left, that they’d holed up somewhere. But something had told the Egyptian that was not the case, and when he’d followed that belief he was rewarded to learn about a brief stop in a village thirty kilometers outside the capital by men who could only have been his quarry. Interestingly, a local merchant had told Imolene that one of the men seemed bound and unable to get out of the jeep they’d driven into the village. This told Imolene that whatever Templeton’s objective, it in some way involved Jack Hawthorne, and that the American was not entirely sold on his role.

It also told Imolene that Templeton and Hawthorne could be caught. He thought it unlikely that they could retain their lead when one man had to act as the other’s jailer.

The difficulty was in tracking them. If they remained in Libya, they would be hard enough to locate. But with both Egypt and Tunisia bordering the country, both relatively simple boundaries to cross, Imolene had a good deal more ground to cover. Of only one thing was he certain. As long as Templeton insisted on dragging the American around, they would not be able to leave the region.

Were Imolene faced with such a choice, the decision would have been obvious. He would have killed the American and left his body in the desert. He wondered why Templeton did not do the same. Or if he lacked the steel to kill a man, he could have found someplace to secure his prisoner while he made his escape. He did, after all, have the prize he’d come for, and unless Imolene caught up with him and took it, the Englishman could make a great deal of money from the artifact. A great deal, if he could gauge such a thing from the Israelis’ interest in it.

His arrangement with the Israelis was something else he had to consider, especially if he didn’t succeed in retrieving the artifact. This had been only his second job for them—the first a more sordid affair that had paid quite well. And so when this opportunity had come along, he’d jumped at it. If he failed in this one, he doubted there would be another.

The Yugo hit a deep rut in the road, and Imolene mouthed a curse when his head hit the ceiling for what seemed the hundredth time. He moved his knee so he could downshift and navigated a turn around a line of boulders that seemed out of place in the middle of nowhere. The next village was a little over forty kilometers ahead, and as the next concentration of civilization was almost a hundred past that, he guessed that Templeton would have stopped at the nearer one.

If he was traveling this way. And if he was even in the country.

Imolene grunted and pushed those thoughts away. He was seldom wrong when it came to finding someone he wanted to find. And he very much wanted to find Martin Templeton.

As Duckey set his phone on the seventeenth-century desk with the Boston-manufacture imprint that he had the luck to acquire from a little old lady at a garage sale in Des Moines, he pondered the advances in technology that made the procurement of multiple flight manifests a thing accomplished with a single phone call, rather than the arduous labor it had been when he was cutting his teeth at Langley. On one hand, he understood that the ability to do something like that signified a level of technological sophistication rightly lauded. On the other, well, it just seemed too easy.

Even just three years earlier, when he’d performed a similar service for Jack, the technology had not been as advanced as it was now. He’d had to make two phone calls and one fax. And even then he’d not felt as if he’d really accomplished anything. After all was done, he’d come to understand the importance of the role he’d played, but he hadn’t felt the fulfillment he thought one was supposed to feel. No wonder, then, that he felt less so as he pushed away from the desk and took a draw from a cigar he’d been nursing since dinner. He would get the manifests within the hour and, if one of them had Jack’s name on it, he’d call Esperanza with the news. Until then, there wasn’t a great deal for him to do.

His office adjoined the family room and from it he could hear that his wife had settled down to watch the evening news. Duckey removed the cigar from his mouth and ground it in an ashtray. When he entered the family room, Stephanie was curled up on the sofa, book in hand. She didn’t look up as he crossed the room and settled down next to her. A few moments passed before she placed a bookmark between the pages and set the book on the end table. As soon as her eyes moved to his, Duckey saw the sly smile in them—the one meant to inform him that she knew something was going on.

Duckey could muster only a weak smile in his defense.

“So are you going to tell me what’s got you so excited?” she asked, to which Duckey only returned a feigned puzzled look.

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You’ve been bouncing off the walls since dinner.”

Duckey, who thought he had a pretty good handle on the events of the evening, none of which had him engaged in any sort of bouncing, nonetheless understood what his wife meant. Except that, by his reckoning, the energy she referred to had been building for quite a while, and the reason it was so noticeable tonight was because it had a focus. Even if that focus wasn’t a very exciting one.

“I’ve just been doing a small favor for a friend,” he said.

Stephanie took that in and parsed it. “My guess is it’s the sort of favor that requires a call or two to Langley?”

“Just one call,” he said. “And not even a long one.”

The question of how his wife would respond to his acknowledgment of having done “spy work,” as she called it, was an open question. After what had happened three years ago, when Duckey had been forced to call in more than a few favors, both during and after Jack’s jaunt around the globe, she’d let him know that she was not willing to spend her days wondering when someone her husband had ticked off would show up at their door. That had been one of the reasons Duckey had quit the Company to begin with.

“It was just a phone call,” he said.

“Just a phone call,” Stephanie repeated. “Well, who’s the friend?”

“Esperanza Habilla. Jack’s friend.”

“Can I assume that Esperanza calling means that Jack’s in some kind of trouble?”

Despite the fact that the former Evanston University archaeology professor had once turned their lives upside down, Duckey knew that Stephanie was fond of him.

“I really don’t know,” Duckey said and then proceeded to tell his wife what he knew, which wasn’t much. When he’d finished, Stephanie pursed her lips and nodded.

“How long until you get your lists from Langley?” she asked.

“Any time now.”

Stephanie nodded, drumming her fingers, and Duckey saw the same look on her face that he saw when his lawyer wife was thinking through a difficult legal concept. When she emerged from this processing she fixed her husband with a smile. “So what does your gut tell you?”

He snorted at the question. “My gut’s expanded way too much over the years to be trustworthy.”

“More of you to love,” she said, reaching across the couch and taking his hand.

Duckey gave it a squeeze but then he grew serious.

“I really don’t know if he’s in trouble,” he said. “But Esperanza thinks he is. And from everything I’ve heard about the woman, I’m willing to throw in with her.”

There was a long pause before Stephanie finally said, “Do what you can to help.” Then, at Duckey’s questioning look, she added, “You won’t be any good until you get this out of your system.”

Duckey laughed, then frowned as what his wife had said sunk in. “Wait a minute. Good at what?”

Stephanie was saved from answering when the phone Duckey had left in his office started to ring.

At some point during the night, Jack thought they had crossed into Tunisia. Going by his knowledge of the region, he knew they could not keep driving west without crossing the border at some point. The only question was whether his captor meant to continue through the narrow southern tip of the country or run straight through to Algeria. He had no way of answering that question without a way to intuit Martin Templeton’s end game. Because regardless of how calm Templeton appeared outwardly, there had to be some kind of plan in mind.

What Jack could not figure out was how he fit into all of it. He understood that Templeton might hold a grudge for Jack’s attempt to steal the artifact out from under him, but he didn’t think that had much to do with being dragged across northern Africa against his will. After all, Jack hadn’t succeeded and the prize was tucked into the back of the jeep with Templeton’s supplies. The fact that Templeton still had him secured in the jeep’s passenger seat told Jack there was something else going on.

For the hundredth time since Templeton had awakened him that morning and they’d started off again, Jack’s thoughts went to the long, slim bundle wedged between two bags in the space behind his and Templeton’s seats. Because of the way the ropes held him, he could only catch a glimpse of the bundle by turning his head, but doing so hurt his neck and so he contented himself with knowing it was back there.

Oddly enough, neither he nor Templeton had mentioned it. At first, Jack’s confinement in the village outside Al Bayda, followed by their flight from the murderous Egyptian, had stymied conversation. Now, though, it was almost all that occupied Jack’s thoughts—even more so than what might happen to him.

“I have to give credit where it’s due, Dr. Hawthorne,” Templeton said, breaking a silence an hour old. “You finding the Nehushtan is a good deal more impressive than my accomplishment. Would you care to tell me how you did it? Professional to professional?”

Momentarily taken aback that Templeton seemed to have intuited his thoughts, Jack didn’t answer right away. Instead, he returned his eyes to the poor excuse for a road over which the Englishman guided the jeep.

“I don’t make a habit of telling trade secrets to people who tie me up and drag me all over the desert and don’t even bother to let me shower once,” Jack returned.

Templeton
tsk
ed and shook his head. “Here I am trying to make nice and you’re hung up on the travel arrangements.”

“Since we both wound up in the same place, I can only assume we got there the same way,” Jack said, but Templeton’s head was shaking before Jack had finished.

“You’re the intrepid explorer who had to figure it out for himself,” Templeton said. “I had considerable help.”

Jack’s brow furrowed. His current circumstances were strange enough, but with each word the Englishman said, Jack could not help but make comparisons to the last time he chose to seek out a biblical relic. The way Templeton made veiled allusions, as well as the knowing smile he aimed at Jack—it all seemed too familiar.

“Whose help?”

“Let’s just say that someone did most of the footwork before I was brought on board,” he said. “My employer simply told me where to go and what to look for.”

Even knowing that Gordon Reese was dead, Jack could barely suppress a shudder when Templeton referred to his employer. However, he recognized the irrationality of that reaction and chose to focus on the fact that his captor was actually giving him information he might be able to use.

“So you’re some sort of mercenary archaeologist, then,” Jack said, understanding it would be taken as a barb and smiling when he saw it work in that fashion. “Let someone else do the work and then sweep in and take all the credit?”

“‘I have only seen farther because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,’” Templeton quoted, and Jack could not disagree with that.

“What do you plan to do with it?”

“I really don’t know.”

That answer didn’t surprise Jack. After all, the Englishman didn’t seem to know what to do with Jack either.

They rode in silence for a while, the desert passing beneath and around them, until Jack, giving in to the temptation to turn and look at the artifact, asked, “Do you have any idea what it is you have back there?”

Martin shrugged. “I’m sure I don’t know its history—its significance—as well as you, but yes, I know what it is.”

Jack nodded, comforted at least that the man knew enough to appreciate it.

“I wasn’t under the impression that you’ve done much work with biblical relics,” Templeton said. “And even those who have generally neglect this one.”

“Let’s just say that, despite what might appear on my résumé, I’ve looked for a relic or two in my day,” Jack said. Then with a wry smile he closed his eyes and didn’t elaborate.