Gold of Kings (24 page)

V
ERY EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
Hakim insisted upon accompanying Emma to the Nice airport. After she had checked in, they took a table at the airport café and Emma had the finest croissant and cappuccino she had ever tasted. Hakim gave that minimalist smile of his, barely creasing the edges around his mouth and eyes. “There are some things which the French do really quite well.”

She studied the imperial palms beyond the taxi stand, the beautiful people loading into waiting limos, the mountains, the dawn light. “Someday I'm going to come back here and see it all for real. Someday soon.”

Hakim used his thumb and forefinger to press the coffee's froth from his moustache. “You were most impressive yesterday.”

“I didn't exactly follow orders.”

“You did your job. That is what is most important.”

“Is it?”

“We share the same objectives, Agent Webb.”

“Emma.” She caught his look. Two smiles in one morning. A record. “I bet you are a superb boss.”

“Something I would like you to keep in mind.”

That was a direction she had no interest in taking. Not after a semi-sleepless night, jerking awake after repeatedly dreaming her way through
the conversations she'd had, totally losing it in transatlantic phone calls to her superiors. Over and over and over. “How did you track down the information on Yves Boucaud so fast?”

“I did nothing except make one phone call. What I said to Harry Bennett was the truth. Interpol has no place for action heroes. No stars. No headline grabbers. Our director general is an American who spent decades in the Washington intelligence services. He loathed the infighting, the way they battled with local police forces, scrabbling like dogs over bones. His objective is very simple. To protect and to serve.”

Hakim finished his coffee, then used his napkin with a surgeon's precision. “Let us say you successfully conclude this case. You would gain all the attention, because we take none. You return to a stellar position at Treasury or at Homeland Security.”

She was pierced by a desire so strong her heart missed a very painful beat. “Fat chance.”

Hakim contradicted her with a moment's silence. “So you return, taking all the credit with you. And one day you receive a call. Perhaps from me, perhaps from another Interpol officer who uses my name. What would you do?”

“Star service. Top of the pile.”

“Precisely.”

She tried to clear the burning from her throat, but it only seemed to shove it up behind her eyes. “I've never wanted to do anything else with my life but this.”

In response, Hakim rose and hefted her suit bag. He badged the officers handling the security checkpoint and waited while her bag was scoped. The passage leading to the planes was ribbed with Riviera sunlight. Hakim said, “There is one other item we must discuss. Something I require your help with.”

“Name it.”

Hakim led her to a window just down from her gate. He set down her case. “I have had my associates check on Harry Bennett. He has been at the forefront of several discoveries. Treasures whose appearances have become true international events. This was prior to his being arrested for bringing up almost a ton of gold doubloons inside Barbados waters without a license.”

“He claims he was in international waters and was framed. I believe him.”

“For the moment, that is irrelevant. What we need to accept is, if the prize is big enough, Harry Bennett will take whatever risk is necessary. And for a prize as large as the hidden treasures from the Second Temple of Jerusalem, Harry Bennett might be capable of anything at all.”

Emma did not have anything to say. Swallowing was hard enough.

“Trafficking in salvaged treasures found within international waters is a crime covered by international treaty.”

“I'm aware of that.”

Hakim's gaze had magnified to where the airport's clamor was filtered down to a faint whisper. “When I said that I or my colleagues would call upon you for assistance, Agent Webb, I was speaking about a very real tomorrow.”

 

AFTER AN EARLY BREAKFAST, HARRY
shepherded Storm down to the Bodrum Harbor and bought two tickets for the ferry to Rhodes. Storm waited until they were crossing the gangplank to say, “Last time I checked, the Greek islands are in the opposite direction from Cyprus.”

“I was planning to tell you yesterday,” Harry replied. “But the way things were, I figured your brain could use a night off.”

Hakim had arranged for them to fly from Istanbul to the coastal village of Bodrum. Harry had been there once before, just after he'd gone full-time into salvage work. In the nineteen years since then, Bodrum had grown from an idyllic fishing village to a tourist mecca. They had spent the night in a portside hotel, dined by room service, and slept with the connecting doors opened between their rooms. Twice Harry had awakened to the sound of a strong woman using her pillow to stifle her sobs.

This morning Storm looked fragile but intact. They took a pair of seats on the ferry's top deck and stowed their bags under the bench. Storm pulled out Sean's tattered Bible, opened her phone, and began tapping the little keys. She would turn to a page marked by a slip of paper, lean over a passage, then type. When she noticed Harry watching, she said, “Sean had these verses he fought with. I'm making a list of
them.” She tapped a passage almost obliterated by Sean's angry scrawl. “I don't understand what he was after. I don't understand why they were so important. All I can say is, even accepting the mystery has given me some very real peace.”

“You want, I could take a walk around the boat, give you some space.”

“No, Harry. I'm very glad you're here.”

So he stayed where he was, warmed by the day and by the lady beside him. If following Sean's tread along this spiritual quest helped Storm reknit the fabric of her heart, then Harry was all for it.

Forty-five minutes later, Harry watched the sailors cast off the mooring ropes. The motors drummed under his feet as the ferry pulled away from the harbor wall. Storm must have noticed how he breathed easier, for she said, “You were worried we'd been followed?”

“Not really. But it's good to be away, just the same.” Their ferry was an ancient vessel whose ulcerous wounds wept rust. He watched as they passed the harbor's encircling arms and said, “Outward bound again. That's what skippers of the old sailing vessels used to write in their log-books when they left safe harbor and entered the deep. Outward bound.”

“How long will the trip take?”

“Three hours. This was Hakim's suggestion. Rhodes is the closest major Greek island to the Turkish coast. We're just trying to cover our tracks a little. Emma will meet us there with a plane.”

Storm stowed away the book and her computer. “We need to talk.”

Harry watched her bundle her hair away from her eyes with a rubber band, then shuck off her pullover and stow it away. The lady was getting down to business. “Fire away.”

“There's so much I don't know. And even more I can't figure out.”

“Rule one in the treasure business. You'll never have all the answers. Comes a point, you lay your money on the table. If there was a sure-fire answer, somebody else would have already found it.”

“What's rule two?”

“Leave with the loot in your pocket and the skin still on your back.”

“I like that one better.”

“I'd like to hear you actually say what it is we're after.”

Storm took a breath. “Treasures from Herod's Second Temple in Jerusalem. Treasures that didn't show up on the triumphant arch of Titus in Rome, but are on the Copper Scroll. The evidence suggests that they were secreted away on Cyprus.”

“Okay, good. So here's what we do. From now on, we assume we're right. We lay out the trail the best we can. And set aside the doubt. It just makes us stumble.”

She gave that a moment. “I can do that.”

Harry leaned back, crossed his arms, stretched out his legs. “So tell.”

“Okay. I've been checking out the two men Professor Morgenthal mentioned in Washington. The first was Titus Flavius Josephus. He was born a Pharisee, a scribe. This made him ideal as a historian, which is what he became for the Romans. Before that happened, he was a general in the first Jewish rebellion.”

She fished through her shoulder bag and pulled out a sheaf of folded notes. She flattened them in her lap. But Harry had the impression they were there more for reassurance than because she needed to check her facts. “In the year AD 39, the Emperor Caligula declared himself a god. He ordered his statues to be erected in every temple throughout the Roman empire. All sacrifices were to be made in his name. From that point, it was only a matter of time. The first Jewish revolt finally erupted in AD 66 in Caesarea and spread like wildfire. But the Jews were far from unified. In his history, Josephus mentions a number of sects or divisions. But only three are important to us. The Zealots, the Temple priests, and the Pharisees.”

Across the calm Aegean waters, a farmer plowed a field on the Turkish headland. Gulls squawked and fought in the dust clouds that drifted in the windless morning. The sound of a guitar and Moroccan drums floated up from the stern. Harry tasted a clove cigarette's pungent odor through the diesel and the salt.

“The Zealots were determined to go down fighting, but others wanted to surrender. While the Romans began laying siege to Jerusalem, civil war broke out inside the city. The Zealots came out in complete control. The die was cast. The city would fight to the last man.

“At least initially, Josephus must have sided with the Zealots. After all, they made him a general of the Jewish forces in Galilee. But there's
no hard evidence that he ever became one, or if he did, that he stayed one. In his history, written years later, he introduces himself as the son of Matthias, an ethnic Hebrew, a priest and Pharisee from Jerusalem. Nothing about being a Zealot. In AD 68 he surrendered to the Romans, and in AD 69 he was granted an audience with Vespasian. Something happened, because in AD 71, as the siege of Jerusalem began, Josephus was a close confidant of the Roman general. Vespasian actually sent Josephus into the city as his personal emissary, to negotiate a surrender. The Zealots responded by burning the city's remaining food supply. They intended for the city to fight until every able-bodied Jew was killed. I think Josephus saw this coming and was absolutely against it. I think he tried to save the city and as many of his people as he could.”

“But he failed,” Harry said.

“He failed and the Romans destroyed the city. Which brings us to the other man Professor Morgenthal mentioned, Yochanan Ben Zakai. He was known as a
tannaim
, a sage of the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish Bible.” Storm stopped and looked at him. “At this point it becomes only a tiny bit of fact inside a whole world of speculation.”

“You're on a roll,” Harry said. “Go for it.”

“In the years leading up to the revolt, a real battle raged between the Pharisees, who saw themselves as guardians of Jewish law, and the Sadduccees, the priests who dominated the temple council, which was called the Sanhedrin. The Pharisees accused these other temple priests of living inside the pocket of their Roman masters. They accused the temple's high priests of bribing Rome for their appointments with money from the temple coffers. I'm guessing these Sadduccees were on the side of those wanting to surrender. Whether the Zealots killed the priests is anybody's guess. But we know this. The Roman accounts do not mention any priests being there when they torched the temple. And we know something else. In the middle of this siege, Yochanan Ben Zakai got out.”

Storm waited.

Harry caught it then. “He escaped from Jerusalem?”

“The only man on record to do so. Supposedly his students smuggled him out as a corpse. But there were thousands of bodies rotting in the streets. Josephus writes of this. It gets even weirder. Not long after his escape, Ben Zakai has an audience with General Vespasian. In this audience, he predicts that Vespasian will be named emperor of Rome.
Vespasian is so taken with this that he lets Ben Zakai establish a new center of Jewish law in Yavneh. After the temple was destroyed, Ben Zakai set up a council that replaced temple sacrifices with prayer, the study of the Torah, and observance of the
mitzvot
, or commandments. He saw this as the means by which the Jewish people could maintain their unity wherever they were exiled, even without the temple.”

“Hang on a second. How did he get to meet the Roman general?”

Storm nodded with her entire upper body, a slow rocking in confirmation. “I haven't found an explanation for that anywhere.”

“Josephus set it up.”

“I think so.”

“It had to be. They were both, what did you call them?”

“Pharisees.”

“Okay, so Josephus offers to enter the city and negotiate for his new friend, Vespasian. Supposedly he fails. Next thing we know, this other guy shows up and has an interview with Caesar.”

“He doesn't become emperor until later, but the rest is on target.”

Inside Harry's brain, the energy hummed a constant rush, like a waterfall, quiet and easy until it went over the edge and careened into space and fell in a blistering roar that caused the air to tremble. Harry had worried that he'd lost that rush for good. He released his breath and the words one at a time. “Josephus did a deal on the side while he was in the city, not to get out this other guy, but to rescue the temple treasures. The guy smuggled the temple treasures out with him. He took the ones he could get his hands on and skipped town.”

“That's what I think.”

“Cyprus would be the perfect place to stash the goods. They'd be looking for a place that was close at hand, but safe.”