Serpent of Moses (11 page)

“A week ago, you called the police about a car that had been abandoned right in front of your café. Do you remember?”

The woman nodded.

“Do you remember seeing the man who drove the car? He would have been an American, younger than me.”

She did not answer right away. Instead, she fixed Duckey with a look common to those who have suffered beneath a regime in which speaking to the wrong people about the wrong things could get one into trouble.

“Who are you and why do you want to know?”

Duckey, who’d been expecting the question, gave her the same answer he’d given the clerk at the police station, understanding that the simple truth worked well in most instances—except when one was on the CIA payroll.

The woman absorbed his response and then seemed to resolve some small conflict within herself.

“I saw the car pull up and I saw your friend get out,” she said. As she spoke, her eyes moved to the window as if she could still see Jack on the sidewalk. “I noticed him because I didn’t have any customers and was hoping he’d come in.”

“Did he?”

She shook her head. “No. He walked north down the sidewalk and I didn’t see him after that.”

“And how long did you wait before you called to report the car?”

“Two days,” she said. “And I only called because the restaurant was busy; the car was taking up space my customers needed.”

Duckey thanked her and then exited the café, heading to the business adjacent to it. Before even entering, he was already certain he knew one of the three things relevant to Jack’s abandonment of the car: he knew why his friend had left it. But that still left him trying to find answers to the other two questions. Where did he go? And once he got there, what kept him from coming back and reclaiming the Taurus?

The inside of the place was much darker than the café, as well as a good deal dirtier. Scattered around the floor and on the sales counter lay cannibalized parts from an untold number of motorbikes. Besides the bikes parked along the sidewalk out front, two older models, each with various parts missing, had been brought inside and leaned against a wall.

Duckey made his way to the counter just as a man in jeans that appeared to be made more of dirt and grease than the original fabric emerged from a back room.

Before long, he’d exited the establishment with the knowledge that, for some reason, Jack Hawthorne had rented a motorbike for a day and had ridden off on it, leaving behind the rental car. He’d paid in cash, which was why the credit report the ex-CIA agent had pulled had not revealed the transaction.

As Duckey stood on the sidewalk, armed with the new information, hands on hips, he pondered what the last hour had accomplished in terms of actionable information. On the surface, the image of Jack riding off on a bike seemed to leave him no closer to finding Jack. Still, his experience tended to come into play in such a situation. In any intelligence agency, knowledge held more value than anything else—even knowledge that didn’t seem important when first acquired. Duckey had served in the field long enough to understand that, at any time, information procured months before and in a different part of the world might be the crucial piece of intel that tied other pieces together.

He hoped too that whatever Esperanza and her brother were discovering in Milan would help them put more of the puzzle together.

The black Mercedes had only been parked on Al Faraq for twenty minutes, but in that time the men inside had noticed a significant decrease in the amount of activity on the street. Where on most days the flow of foot, bicycle, and auto traffic would have been constant—the resultant noise of those activities combining to form something like an exuberant chorus—as the car remained there, the flow of bodies and vehicles slowed to a trickle, the song to a whisper.

Boufayed could have chosen a less obvious car from which to watch the American navigate around Al Bayda, but the Mercedes had been the first available, and as the target in this case was a foreigner who would not be as attuned to the city’s movements as a local would have been, he’d decided to choose rapid mobilization over invisibility.

The driver, who had not spoken for more than an hour, and whose name Boufayed did not know, kept his eyes on the narrow street down which the American had disappeared fifteen minutes ago, deeper into Khansaa, one of Boufayed’s agents following on foot. From where the Mercedes sat, on the street that divided the poorer Al Bayda neighborhood from Rabaah Adawiyyah, Boufayed could see the entrances to the two shops where James Duckett had gone and where another of Boufayed’s men had entered afterward to interview the workers.

The American’s first stop at the café hadn’t been a surprise to the Libyan after interrogating the clerk at the Al Bayda police station, who informed them of Duckett’s interest in an abandoned rental car several days prior to his arrival in Tripoli. That revelation had launched another branch of the investigation. They’d run the name Jack Hawthorne and what the system had kicked back was cause for confusion more than anything else. Boufayed wondered what an itinerant archaeologist was doing poking around Al Bayda, and how was he connected to a former CIA agent. That, and if another connection existed. People back in his Tripoli office were working to find a link between Jack Hawthorne and the German killed weeks ago. Both were historians, albeit of different varieties.

As he pondered these things, he saw his man emerge from the rental store and head toward the Mercedes. He crossed the street and slipped into the back seat.

“He told the woman in the restaurant the same thing he told the clerk,” the agent said. “Just that this Hawthorne is a friend that he’s looking for.”

“And the rental shop?” Boufayed asked.

“The owner said that an American rented a motorbike last week but has not returned it. He told the same to the CIA agent.”

Boufayed nodded his acknowledgment and then shifted his eyes back to the street where Duckett had disappeared. There was nothing to do but wait until the man tailing him called to say where he would stop next.

When he awoke, the light that had entered the home through the lone window in the front room was gone. A lamp burned on a small table in the corner and he could smell the odors of cooking, hear the sounds of people moving around the kitchen. It took him a few moments to realize that he’d been sleeping for hours. Rising, he winced at the tightness in his neck and then walked around the corner and into the kitchen area. The staff was where he’d left it, and he felt an anxiety he hadn’t realized he was holding begin to fade—a realization he felt guilty about considering the kindness of his hosts.

Both the man and the woman—Khamel and Nadia, Jack had learned—were in the room and both looked over as he entered, Khamel offering a warm smile and Nadia an expression that he couldn’t quite identify, except to know that it was different from the one she’d used on him that morning.

“We were beginning to think you would sleep through the night,” Khamel said, and Jack was grateful that the Arabic was coming back to him.

“I’m sorry for abusing your hospitality,” Jack answered. “I hadn’t meant to sleep that long.”

Khamel waved Jack’s apology away.

“A prophet brandishing the staff of Allah can sleep wherever and whenever he wishes,” the Tunisian said—a statement that earned the husband a frown from his wife.

Khamel chuckled beneath the glare, which told Jack the man did not believe what he had just said, which meant Jack did not have to disavow the moniker he’d just been granted.

Nadia brought over two cups of tea and motioned for Jack to partake, and so he joined Khamel at the table.

“So you and the others have made a decision, then?”

Khamel’s smile faded, but the mirth did not entirely flee his eyes.

“There was some discussion about whether you were a thief who deserves to be killed for carrying a holy item through the desert at night, or a man chosen by God to carry his standard through the wilderness without food or water, with only his hand to protect you.”

Jack considered the two extremes and was chagrined to realize he probably fit in the former category. Khamel’s smirk told Jack that he agreed.

“You have eaten our bread and drank our tea and so you are ours to protect,” Khamel said. “And regardless of your intentions, you do hold the staff of Allah and we must entrust that you have been given it for a reason.”

“Do you believe that?” Jack asked before he could stop himself.

At the question, Khamel’s face became a thing carved from stone. The look he leveled on the American was one that seemed to take in and measure everything about him, and all Jack could do was to sit beneath the scrutiny. After what seemed a long while, Khamel answered.

“I believe all things happen for a reason,” he said. “I believe that very strongly.” He let that hang there, perhaps to see if Jack had a response, but when Jack said nothing, Khamel continued, “But I also believe that Allah’s plans are such that it does not serve us to ponder their intricacies. Instead, we act on what we know or on what we feel to be true. We make our decisions and we trust that God will take them and make them work within the framework of the story he is writing.”

Jack thought that sounded as solid a worldview as he could remember hearing and he was grateful for it.

The two men lapsed into silence as they drank their tea and while Nadia prepared dinner. Only when Jack had drained the cup did Khamel speak again.

“Tell me,” he said. “How did you come into possession of it?”

He was looking at the staff and Jack looked over as well. He was certain it hadn’t been moved since the last of the elders had left several hours ago. When Jack looked back at Khamel, it was to find that he did not want to answer the question. To the Tunisian, reasonable and educated man that he appeared to be, the Nehushtan was something that validated the deep mysteries of a religion he’d been practicing since boyhood. Because of that, he wanted to preserve for Khamel the image of his God reaching down from the heavens to hand a relic to his chosen infidel rather than to tell him that he had found the staff through research and dumb luck. He was saved from having to make a decision, though, when the front door swung open.

The words that the newcomer said to Khamel were delivered too quickly for Jack to understand, but they had an immediate effect on Khamel, whose face darkened. His host glanced at Jack before responding to the other man. When he did answer, it was at a speed Jack could understand.

“Bring him,” he said.

Once the man had gone, Jack waited for Khamel to fill him in, yet the Tunisian seemed content to remain silent and so Jack took his cues from him. Consequently, when the door opened a few minutes later and Martin Templeton was pushed over the threshold, three armed men behind him, Jack had established an equanimity not easily upended.

It took a few moments for Templeton to find him in the room, and when he did, when the Englishman’s eyes flitted over him and then shifted back, the one thing Jack noticed was that the other man’s face was absent of surprise.

“Well played, Dr. Hawthorne,” Templeton said after a moment. “Well played, indeed.”

Esperanza was as tired as her brother, but there was no way she would give him the satisfaction of knowing it. Not after her repeated digs at how much he complained about walking through the city, telling him that his years spent selling pricey baubles to tourists had softened him. He’d bristled at that. But as he watched his sister navigating blocks upon blocks of Milan sidewalks without a pause, there was little he could say to refute the insults.

Truth be told, Espy’s feet hurt like they hadn’t in years and she was used to traversing the streets of Caracas—streets that rivaled those of San Francisco in their steepness. She’d been thankful for the times when the place they wanted to reach was sufficiently separated from the place they were to mandate a bus or cab ride.

They’d been at it for almost six hours, bouncing from one museum to another, as well as checking an art gallery, school, and antiquities dealership, and so far they’d come up with nothing. Their most promising stop had been their first, the evening before, when she and Romero had met with Dr. Joseph Hartman, professor of modern art at Brera. And Espy only considered that stop a success because Hartman at least knew Jack, even if he hadn’t seen nor heard from the missing archaeologist in years. At each of the other locations she couldn’t find anyone who knew his name, much less could explain why he might have gone missing.

She and Romero had agreed to call it a day and were looking for a place to get something to eat before heading back to the hotel when she decided to check one more place off her list. The sign above the door said
Petrone’s Past Fashionables
, and the only reason Espy wanted to stop there was because it was on the same street as their hotel. It was a poor reason to stop and yet she knew that Jack was a creature of spontaneity, which made her wonder if adding a bit of impulsiveness to the hunt for him was worth a try.

When Espy pushed open the door, sending a bell ringing above her, she fell in love with the place before she’d made it more than two steps in. The place had a charm to it, despite the haphazard arrangement of the merchandise. Before the door closed shut, the proprietor greeted them. He was short, wore dark pants and too large a shirt. He flashed them a smile that showed two missing teeth.

Espy liked him right away.

“How may I help you?” he asked in bad Spanish, likely picking the language from an assessment of the physical characteristics of Espy and her brother.

“You have a fine store,” Espy answered in flawless Italian, genuinely impressed by the quality and breadth of the merchandise she could see through all the clutter.

“You have a good eye.” His smile widened and he took a moment to run an appraiser’s eye over the pair. “You look like a book lover,” he said, reverting to Italian. “Can I interest you in a first-edition
I Giochi Numerici
? It has notes from Alberti in the margins.”

Esperanza offered a smile and shook her head. “What we’re really after is information. We’re looking for someone. There was a man—an American—who might have come in here a week or so ago.”

The diminutive shopkeeper adopted a puzzled look. Petrone’s Past Fashionables was located on one of Milan’s busiest streets, where tourists streamed in numbers that made an honest businessman salivate. To recall a single individual after several days was close to impossible.

“He’s a bit over six feet tall,” Espy went on. “Dark hair. Probably needed a shave and to have his clothes ironed.” Espy paused, glancing around the store in a gesture meant to take in the whole of the intriguing chaotic mess of the place. “And he would have loved a place like this.”

As she described Jack, she saw the proprietor’s features slide in a different direction, as if he was trying to make a connection between the description and a memory and partially succeeding. She exchanged a look with Romero, who didn’t speak Italian and so had only a vague idea of what was being discussed. When she returned her gaze to the man she could only presume was Petrone himself, she saw something that looked like distaste had joined the menagerie of other expressions.

“What was this gentleman’s name?” he asked, and if Espy hadn’t known better, she would have thought he had a name in mind.

“Jack Hawthorne,” she said.

“Do you know where he is?”

Espy noticed a vein beginning to throb in the man’s neck. She shook her head. “That’s why we’re here. We’re looking for him and were hoping he’d been here.”

Petrone’s response was a dry spit that might have struck the ground near Espy’s foot had there been anything to it.

“I guess that means he’s seen Jack?” Romero remarked.

Espy ignored him.

“I swear to you,” Petrone said. “If Hawthorne so much as steps one foot into my store, even with my money, I’ll kill him.” He spat again for emphasis.

Despite the vehement reaction of the shopkeeper, Espy couldn’t keep a slight smile from finding its way to her lips. Even though Petrone wanted to kill him, the man’s vitriol meant that Jack was alive. And knowing that half the people Jack met ended up wanting to kill him made her less concerned about Petrone’s threat than she might otherwise have been. After all, she’d watched more than one angry person level a firearm on him.

“Let me guess,” she said. “He owes you money.”

“He owes me
a lot
of money,” Petrone corrected. “He borrowed a book. He was supposed to bring it back in a few days, but I haven’t seen him since.”

He shook his head and ran a hand through his dark hair, releasing a chuckle.

“I should have known,” he said. “I loaned it to him because I knew him, but that’s why I should have known better.”

“How long have you known Jack?” Espy asked.

“Too long. At least ten years.”

Espy nodded. “So, what was the book he ‘borrowed’?”

Up until now, Espy was under the impression that the Italian viewed her as an ally—someone who could understand his anger against the man who’d deprived him of something of value, and probably not for the first time. Now she sensed something else in the pause before he responded.

“Who are you?” he finally said, ignoring her question about the book.

Espy moved deeper into the store, placed her hands on a glass countertop. Beneath the glass lay an assortment of rare and expensive items. The entire shop and its merchandise suggested that Petrone was not a man hung up on a single item’s expense, which meant his anger at Jack had less to do with the value of the book than it did the principle of the thing.

“My name’s Esperanza,” she said. “I’m a friend of Jack’s.” She turned away from the counter and aimed an apologetic smile at Petrone. “You won’t hold that against me, will you?”

“I might say a prayer for you,” Petrone said.

“Actually it’s Jack who’s in need of prayer. He’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“We think so, yes. The last time anyone saw him, he was boarding a plane for Libya. Before that, we know he was in Milan.” She locked eyes with the Italian and shrugged. “Who knows? You might be the last person he talked to before he disappeared.”