Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) (14 page)

“Clear,” I whispered.

The first thing that struck me was the smell of incense. The house was eerily quiet, no radio sounds, no snoring, not even a clock ticking. The only noise was the hum of a refrigerator. We were in a combination living-dining room. A doorway off the dining room would lead to the kitchen and humming refrigerator. The door off the living room would go to bedrooms and baths.

“Cover my backside,” I said, moving toward the open inside door.

I glanced around the door frame and found a hallway. To the right it headed through a utility area before reaching the kitchen. A small, flat night-light glowed from a wall outlet, revealing several doors, all open but one. I was quiet on the carpet. I checked the first doorway on the right. Tile floor. Bathroom.

The room on the left showed a bed, its spread smooth and untouched. The next one was the same. Something was amiss. I bypassed the closed door to check the room at the end of the hall, another vacant bedroom. The closed door should be a hall closet. Opening it, I spotted the bag of a vacuum cleaner in the glow from the night-light.

I turned to Ted, who had been following with his back to me. “This place is empty,” I said.

“What do you make of it?” Ted asked.

I thought back to that phone call I had received while sitting in the parking lot off
Old Hickory Boulevard
, the excited voice in the background, the speaker’s sudden decision to end the call and continue “later.”

“Something spooked them.” I told him what I had heard.

“Should we turn the lights on and give it a thorough going-over?”

“I’d rather not get the neighbors curious, if somebody should be up and about. Maybe the living room would be okay. Let’s see what we might turn up there.”

I switched on a table lamp. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, but on the dining room table beyond we found a small radio receiver connected to a speaker and a cassette recorder. It had undoubtedly been used to monitor the bug connected to my telephone. The living room also struck me as exceptionally neat, except for a piece of paper in the center of the floor. Ted saw it, also, and stooped to pick it up, handling it carefully by the edges. After examining it, he turned to me, a strange look on his face.

“It’s an airline baggage tag. El Al.”

“What airports?” I asked.

“TLV, JFK and BNA. What’s TLV?”

“Tel Aviv,” I said. “
Ben-Gurion
Airport
. What’s the date on it?”

“Today. Well, yesterday, actually.”

That suddenly made sense, in an odd sort of way. “I think that tells us who left the door unlocked and who spooked the Arabs.”

“Who?”

“The
Temple
Alliance
people. They flew into
Nashville
and went straight to my house, remember? But it was an hour or so before he called to say they had checked into a motel. I’d guess they journeyed over here in the meantime.”

“They’re awfully careless to drop something like this.”

I shook my head. “They dropped it on purpose. It’s a message that says, ‘We’re here and we’re onto you.’ How, I don’t know. And how the other guys were warned to get out is another mystery.”

“Any ideas?”

Fatigue and anxiety had done their work on me. “I don’t have any more ideas about anything.”

“You look like you’ve had it, Boss. You’d better get to bed before you fall on your face.”

I agreed. In fact, I couldn’t think of why I shouldn’t go home, find the nearest bed.

“Let’s get out of this damned place and head for
Trinity Lane
and I-65,” I said. “We can get a room for the night at one of the motels over there.”

“Okay. Maybe by morning we can make some sense of all this.”

I found myself asking Ted, almost like a prayer, “But we’re making progress–right?”

“Yeah, Boss. We’re making progress.”

“Fight the tigers.”

“Yeah.”

Chapter
18

It must have been just getting daylight. The room was still fairly dark, but I could see everything clearly. The bare walls, the closed door, the face of the man in front of me–first serious, then grinning. He looked almost like the souvenir seller from
Jaffa
, with his dark jacket and open-collared shirt. I was sitting in a chair with my ankles bound to the chair legs. I didn’t know how I had gotten here.

“Where is the scroll?” the man asked in a strident voice.

“For all I know, it’s been torched,” I said.

“You gave it to somebody. Who?”

“You’ll never get a hand on it until you return my wife.”

“You will tell us
now
!” His face darkened in a rush of blood.

“Go to hell.”

He came a little closer, but not close enough for me to get a hand on him. And I knew he was not from
Jaffa
. He spoke English like a native.

“If you don’t hand over the scroll, here’s what we’re going to do. Your wife will be brought in here. She will be raped in front of you, then her fingers will be cut off one at a time–”

When somebody laid a hand on my shoulder, I came up swinging.

“Boss! Hey, wake up!”

Ted Kennerly dodged away from the bed and I stopped flailing my arms, sitting up, disoriented.

I blinked and looked around the room. I remembered where I was. I shook my head to clear it. “Sorry. The bad guys had me and they were threatening Jill with–” I took a deep breath and fought down the ultimate nightmare. “What time is it?”

“Just after eight. You’ve been lying there like a corpse for six hours. Until just now, that is. I would have let you sleep longer, but I thought you’d want to know the situation.”

I swung my legs off the side of the bed. “What situation? Have you heard from Jill?”

“Not from Jill, but I just talked to the joker who’s holding her.”

“Tell me.”

Ted sat on the bed opposite me and flipped open a spiral note pad. “I turned off your cell phone after we got here. I didn’t want the thing to ring and wake you. When I turned it back on, I checked the voice mail.”

“Had he left a message?”

“Yeah. I don’t know where he was, but I doubt that he’d gone back for the van, risked changing that tire.”

“When did he call?” I asked.

“Around
four a.m.
The message said he would call back at eight. I’ve been using a pay phone in the lobby, so I took the cell phone with me.”

“Shit, Ted, I wish you’d got me up. You know how concerned I am.”

“Sorry. Bad judgment call.”

“What did he say?”

“About what you’d expect. We need to arrange a meeting so they can free Jill and collect the scroll. I explained that I was a friend staying with you, that you were completely worn out and probably wouldn’t wake up for another couple of hours. He asked if you had been contacted by anyone else. I told him not that I knew of.”

“Good, that’s good. What did he propose in the way of a meeting?”

“Nothing. Just said he would call you back around
ten o’clock
.”

I had slept in my underwear and got up to head for the bathroom. “I need to get cracking and try to turn up some leads before then.”

Ted did a nervous little foot-shifting. “I got up early and started doing some checking myself,” he said.

I stood there in my underwear. “Into what?”

“I thought . . . well, I called in a few favors with a good contact at the FBI. I asked him to look into your friend Eli Zalman.”

I sat back down on the end of the bed, hands gripping the mattress. “And?”

“He turned up some intriguing facts. Mr. Zalman arrived at Kennedy early last evening, accompanied by one Asher Lipkowitz. They left on the next flight to
Nashville
. He identified both men as former Mossad officers now in the employ of the
Temple
Alliance
. Their current duties, as he put it, are not fully known.”

Not bad, I had to admit. But he should have roused me before venturing off on his own. It was
my
wife whose life was on the line. As I rubbed the stubble on my chin, Ted revealed more.

“I called Zalman at his motel and told him I was a friend of yours. I explained what I did and said I understood he had been involved in the same line of work.”

“Jesus. How did he take that?”

“Very casually. He’s a pro. He wanted to know if my call was official business, but I assured him I was only helping a former colleague. My FBI contact said he understood Zalman had probably been involved in one of those Arab assassination plots, but he couldn’t confirm it.”

I finally found something to smile at. “If they knew these people might be in the area, I can see why the guys left heir house on
Sheridan
in such a rush. What else did our Mr. Zalman say?”

“I hope
I
didn’t say too much,” Ted said.

“Ah, Ted…”

“When he asked about the scroll,” he went on hurriedly, “I told him you had put it somewhere for safekeeping. He wanted to know if another group claiming to be the rightful owners had called. I decided it might prompt him to be a little more forthcoming if I told him about Jill. It worked. He said he wasn’t surprised, that a
Nashville
man was affiliated with a group called the Guardians of Palestine, which has links to Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah, the old-time hostage takers. That deepened my fears for Jill. I reached for my crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Did he identify the man?”

“Can’t smoke in here, Boss. Yeah. Said his real name was Kamal Nazari, but he wasn’t sure if that was the name he used here. And get this–he lives on a street called
Sheridan
.”

“You done good, Ted. Remind me to recommend you for promotion.” I hurried to the bathroom.

I took a quick shower and Ted let me borrow his electric shaver. I had to push aside thoughts of Jill. It was a new day for her. How was she holding up? I got my thoughts back on track to save my sanity. I decided a follow-up on Kamal Nazari and the
Sheridan Drive
address would be the most promising. Check around for bills or letters, anything lying around to reveal his identity.

Then I had another thought. “I need my computer to check on that house,” I said, pulling on my pants. “But I hate to think about the time we’d lose on a trip out to Hermitage.”

“What do you need the computer for?”

“The Planning Commission has a page on the Metro web site that lets you look up properties using their aerial maps.”

“How about I get my laptop out of the car? It has a modem.”

“Get moving,” I said.

He was back in a couple of minutes, removed the line from the phone and plugged it into the computer, a gadget smaller than a briefcase. “Get your internet browser and I’ll take it from there,” I said.

It was a state-of-the-art laptop. He began pecking on the keyboard and in hardly any time at all handed it to me. “Okay,” he said, “she’s ready.”

I got the aerial maps page on the screen with an outline of Metropolitan Nashville and
Davidson
County
. After a couple of zooms in toward
Sheridan Drive
, I found the lot and clicked on it. A box at the right side of the screen listed all the property information, such as type of house, lot size, date of sale, assessed value and–what I was looking for–the owner’s name. It listed him as Kermit Nagy.

“He must have had some monogrammed shirts he didn’t want to give to Good Will,” Ted said, looking over my shoulder.

I agreed. “Kamal Nazari didn’t have to exercise much imagination to come up with Kermit Nagy. Now I need a City Directory to find out where he works.”

“Who do you know that has one?”

“The DA’s office. I can call May Richards. She’s a secretary I always got along well with.”

I plugged the line back into the telephone and dialed the district attorney’s number. When I got May, I became my usual charming self. “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age,” I said, resorting to my pseudo-Southern persona. “You’re looking good.”

“How do you know? You can’t see me.” The words were accompanied by a high-pitched laugh.

“Oh, but I can,” I said. “Before I left, I snuck a camera into your computer. I can see you on the screen.”

“You’re full of bull, Greg McKenzie. What can I do for you?”

“As a matter of fact, I’d like you to look up a name for me in your City Directory. It’s Kermit Nagy on
Sheridan Drive
.”

“Hang on a minute,” she said.

I put my hand over the phone and turned to Ted. “She’s looking it up.”