Serpent of Moses (13 page)

Instead, Jack crossed the room until he was close enough to the hole that he could lean out, although he did so carefully, staying to the side and positioning himself so he could see a good portion of the village without clearing the cement wall. Despite the light from whatever was burning, it was difficult to see anything clearly. As he stood there, though, he began to see people resolve in the darkness, their movements punctuated by gunfire. What he didn’t see was anyone paying any attention to the building he was in—a realization that urged him to action.

As he moved away from the wall, he realized he knew too little about local politics to understand who was attacking and why. But neither could he shake from his mind Templeton’s mention of the Israelis. From what Jack could recall about the political situation in the larger region, an Israeli military presence in Libya didn’t make any sense. Still, there were appropriate times to ponder such questions, and alone in a room with a newly formed window was definitely not that time.

Except, he had to remind himself, he wasn’t alone.

The Englishman had stopped his moaning, and from where he stood Jack couldn’t tell if the man was breathing. Jack had reached the door again and thought about leaving Templeton to whatever fate awaited him. It was what he would have done years ago; he would have walked out of the room, retrieved the staff if he could, and fled the village without a second thought. But then Jack wasn’t the man he once was, even if his inner growth didn’t seem to be happening fast enough for Espy.

Releasing a sigh, he turned away from the door and went to check on Templeton. A quick examination revealed a large discolored knot on the man’s forehead. Jack winced in sympathy, put a hand on the Englishman’s shoulder, and gave him a rough shake that pulled the man up from the depths. When Templeton’s eyes fluttered open, Jack leaned in close.

“I’m getting out of here,” he said. “Do you think you can walk on your own?”

To his credit, Templeton began to move immediately, and Jack put an arm under his shoulder and helped him to his feet. The Englishman caught sight of the large hole in the wall but did not linger, instead following Jack to the door.

When they entered the hallway, the two guards were gone, the house silent save for the continuing echo of gunfire. Jack proceeded to the front room, Templeton in tow, and found it empty. He turned to the wall against which he’d propped the staff, already knowing what he would find and thinking dark thoughts when his suspicion proved true. But pragmatism forced any brooding from his mind and he went to the table. Still lying there were his phone and the keys to the jeep. Then, without a glance at Templeton, he hurried to the front door, convinced that the sounds of conflict were growing louder.

Opening the door just enough to see out, he scanned the space in front of the cluster of buildings, spotting a sprawled form not far from the nearest home, as if the man had been cut down the moment he’d stepped outside. On the ground next to the unmoving villager Jack saw what looked like an assault rifle.

The body gave him pause, but Jack understood that he couldn’t stay in the house. Whatever was happening around him, he knew his best chance of escaping it rested in getting to the jeep. He was outside an instant later, not caring if Templeton followed.

Jack ran to the villager’s side and rolled the man over just enough to see the bloodstained hole in his chest. Jack released him and grabbed the assault rifle lying a few feet away. He didn’t see any movement around him, but he disliked being in an open space and so took off running again, slipping into the narrow alley between two of the buildings. He looked back to take in the terrain: the well directly ahead and the line of structures on the other side.

By then, Templeton had caught up to Jack and was by his side in the alley.

“Where did you park?” he asked Templeton.

The Englishman shrugged. “We should be looking at it. I stopped in that open space past the well. That’s where your friends and I made our acquaintance.”

So the jeep had been moved.

As Jack pondered his next step, he caught sight of two figures stepping out into the village center on the other side of the well. They were dressed in black, head to toe, and with their faces covered. Each held a weapon, and Jack could pick out more ordnance on belts and vests. While there were no obvious markings on their clothes, Jack had no doubt that they were military. He pulled back deeper into the shadow of the alley and exchanged a look with Templeton, who appeared uncharacteristically grim. With a nod for Jack to follow, the Englishman turned and headed in the other direction. Both men moved to where the alley ended and surveyed the scene.

While the village center had been largely still, the area beyond the first line of buildings was awash with people and noise. As Jack took it in, he realized his original estimation of the village’s size had been incorrect; it was in fact much larger. From his position he could make out more of the black-clad figures, perhaps a dozen, engaged in firefights with armed villagers. At first, Jack was surprised to see so many of the locals armed with such firepower. But then he remembered that this part of the world required a citizenry ready for any contingency.

“There’s the jeep,” Templeton said, pointing, and Jack followed the line of the man’s index finger until he saw the much-abused vehicle. It was parked next to a house that was much larger than the others. Jack could see several still forms on the ground in the immediate vicinity. The problem was getting to it without being cut down. He took another long look at his surroundings.

“Nothing ventured,” he said, and with the gun in his hands he stepped out into the open, aiming for the jeep. There was no way to tell if it was the darkness that covered their flight or if anyone who might have shot at them was otherwise engaged, but they crossed the distance without incident, the keys jingling in Jack’s pocket. As they neared their means of escape, though, he chanced a glance at the trio of dead men at the doorstep of the large home. It was just a passing glance and yet it was enough that a thought sprang up in his head.

When he veered off course and headed for the front door, he could feel more than hear Templeton’s surprise. Jack didn’t spend any time checking on the fallen men except to note that he’d sat at a table with at least two of them not long ago.

He entered the home with the gun ready, but the only thing that greeted him was silence. Templeton followed him in. Advancing past the front room, Jack continued down the hallway, seeing that the home had several more rooms than the one in which his hosts lived. Jack performed a quick check on each of the rooms, wishing for more time yet anxious to get away from there. When he reached the end of the hall, approaching the last room, its door ajar, he found what he’d hoped he wouldn’t.

Going by the spray of blood on the back wall, the old man had been shot as he stood between the bed and the wall. Apparently he was then dragged to the center of the room. Before moving to him, Jack glanced around the room but suspected that if the men who had attacked the village were after the staff and had found it, they would no longer be fighting in the streets.

When he reached the elder’s side, he almost jumped when the man opened his eyes. They were clouded and feverish, and Jack knew he would be gone in moments. The man looked up at Jack, a weak smile on his face. He reached for Jack’s arm, wrapping thin fingers around his wrist. He looked as if he would speak, so Jack leaned in closer.

“The lights . . .” the old man whispered. It looked as if he would say more, but then his eyes closed. Jack placed a hand on the man’s chest, felt it rising and falling but struggling to do so. He tried to rouse the man without success.

Seeing there was nothing more he could do, Jack stood.

“The lights—what did he mean by that?” Templeton asked.

Jack didn’t reply, but he supposed it most likely meant nothing. Just the delirium of a dying man. Except that the look in the old man’s eyes as he’d said it made Jack think there was some importance attached to it. As he pondered this—aware that he was playing a dangerous game with time—he looked up. It was then that he noticed the ceiling-mounted light fixture. It was simple, with a wide base and a trio of bulbs . . . and yet the light fixture tugged at something in the back of his mind.

“I hate to question the decisions of a man who could have left me for dead,” Templeton said, “but I’m reasonably confident that remaining in this village is a death sentence.”

Jack ignored Templeton while the image of the light kept tugging at his brain.

Finally it came to him. He shook his head and said, “The village doesn’t have electricity.”

He hurried into the front room to find a chair. When he returned, he set the chair beneath the light fixture. After reluctantly handing the gun to Templeton, he went about the work of figuring out how the thing was attached to the ceiling. It took a few minutes of pulling and twisting, but eventually he had the fixture off, the separation from the ceiling revealing no wires.

He handed the fixture to Templeton and then reached his hand into the hole, feeling the cool air above the ceiling. There seemed to be a good bit of space up there. Jack moved his hand around until he nudged something solid. He closed his hand around it and after a bit of finagling had the staff positioned so he could pull it from the hole. When he was finished and had climbed down from the chair, he saw the old man’s eyes open again. Jack knelt down beside him. The elder’s eyes moved from Jack to the Nehushtan.

“Perhaps Allah did choose you to keep it safe,” the old man said, his voice throaty, fading.

Jack nodded solemnly.

“I’ll certainly try,” he said, but the elder had already passed.

When Jack and Templeton stepped outside, it seemed that the action had waned. What little of it Jack could hear seemed to have moved farther away. Thankful for good timing, Jack started for the jeep, the staff in one hand, the reclaimed gun in the other. Despite the circumstances, he found that his mood had improved and with that altered disposition he found himself harboring no more doubt of a successful escape from the besieged village. He put the staff in the jeep’s open back and, leaning the gun between the seats, reached for the door handle.

He sensed the movement off to his left a second later—a figure in black stepping out of the shadows. Jack saw the man’s gun rising even as he turned, as he tried to snatch up his own weapon that suddenly wasn’t there anymore. He heard the shot, a deafening boom that seemed too near his left ear. He felt his body spasm but knew almost immediately that he hadn’t been hit. He looked down to confirm the fact and then back up where, strangely, he saw the masked soldier swaying drunkenly.

As the man fell to the ground, gone before he finished his descent, Jack turned to see a shaking Martin Templeton. The Englishman was still holding the gun out, as if he would shoot again if the dead man twitched. He was breathing heavily, a wild look in his eyes.

“Our phones,” Templeton said.

Jack, who had spent the last thirty minutes guiding the jeep north and away from the doomed village as fast as he was able, looked over at the other man, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s how the Israelis found us,” Templeton explained. “They tracked our phones.”

Jack absorbed that and, eyes back on what was a road in name only, said, “So explain to me why Israelis attacked a Tunisian village in the middle of nowhere. And how you knew who they were.” A pause. “If that’s who they were.”

“Because that’s who hired me to recover the Nehushtan,” Templeton said.

That pronouncement came just as the right front tire of the jeep dipped into a rut that had jumped out from the darkness into the jeep’s path. The jostling sent their few possessions sliding around in the back, and Jack glanced over his shoulder to see that the staff was still secure. That done, he turned his attention back to the Englishman.

“Someone from Israel hired you to find the staff?”

Templeton shook his head. “When I said the Israelis, I meant the Israelis—as in the government. By my understanding, there are elements within their government who are engaged in a cultural mandate of sorts. I suppose you could call it a reclaiming of their history.”

“You mean they’re collecting things that speak to their past.”

“Yes. That’s my understanding,” Templeton said. “And I would say that a staff supposedly used by Moses qualifies.”

Jack turned silent for a moment. What Templeton had told him wasn’t hard to accept. After all, hadn’t the Egyptians been engaged in much the same thing over the last few decades? Reclaiming treasures plundered from them over the centuries? However, to the best of Jack’s knowledge, they hadn’t resorted to sending military units into other countries willing to slaughter people in order to get what they wanted.

“And they are trying to kill us because . . . ?” Jack asked.

“Why do the Israelis do anything they do?” Templeton said dismissively.

Jack aimed an irritated look in his direction.

“My guess is that once I took you prisoner, and once Imolene reported that to our employers, they decided I was not the sort of man they wanted on their payroll,” Templeton said.

“But Imolene is?”

Templeton shrugged. “He does what he’s asked, he does it well, and then he forgets. If I were the Israelis, I would probably choose him over me too.”

“But why would they have to use outside resources in the first place? If you want to keep something quiet, the best way to go about it is by keeping it all in-house.”

“I suspect that’s exactly what they do,” Templeton said. “At least as much as they’re able. I’m sure they’d like to handle as many of these recovery operations by themselves as they can. But there are certain places in which the presence of an Israeli attracts too much attention.”

“Like Libya.”

“Like Libya,” Templeton agreed.

“And yet they send an entire team into Tunisia.”

“The village was likely remote enough for them to feel comfortable chancing a larger scale operation,” Templeton said. “But you can be certain that none of the Israelis will have carried identification.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that, and both men lapsed into silence. Jack had a good deal to consider—chief among them, Martin Templeton. It seemed odd that the man who’d held him captive for days, the man who’d precipitated Jack’s flight through the desert, was now sitting next to him as if none of it had happened. In truth, Jack wanted to do little else but find what passed for a police station in Raballah and drop the man off. The reality that agents from a foreign government were after them, however, changed things. After what Jack had witnessed in the village, he had no doubt that Templeton was telling the truth, and this being the case, he suspected that having the Englishman with him was necessary if he stood any chance of extricating himself from the situation. For at least a while longer he had to keep the man with him.

“I assume you can get in touch with whoever’s paying you?” he asked.

Templeton’s eyes were closed, but Jack knew he wasn’t sleeping.

“I could. But the only good that would do would be to give away our location.”

“Just cataloguing our assets,” Jack said.

Templeton simply nodded, leaving Jack alone with his thoughts. And the longer he drove, the more he found those thoughts returning to the artifact, which had probably covered more ground in the past few days than it had for more than a thousand years. Despite everything he’d gone through, and everything he still might endure, he would not even consider the thought that it wasn’t worth it.

There was something about recovering an artifact like the Nehushtan that superseded much of his other work. For even though he’d personally supervised the digs of more than a dozen ancient tombs, pulling an impressive number of priceless objects from them, and even though his experience with biblical relics, while minimal, was such that those who had devoted their entire careers to the field would have envied him had they known, Jack was so drawn to the mystery of the object that he could not begin to regret his circumstances.

“It’s worth it,” he said, not realizing he’d spoken the words aloud until Templeton responded.

“It’s the story behind it,” Templeton said. “Most of us heard the story when we were children. We could almost see Moses drive the staff into the ground, the Israelites crawling toward it in hopes of being healed.” He paused and looked off into space, as if imagining the events he described. “It’s such a visceral image. The dying pulling themselves across the ground or being carried by their loved ones, hoping to look upon a totem created at the instruction of God.”

He glanced back at the artifact and let out a sigh.

“That’s what separates this from just about anything else you could dig up,” he went on. “When we went to Sunday school, we were fed stories of great deeds performed by people who were larger than life. This was already in our collective consciousness.”

Jack nodded. It was as valid a summation as he could have come up with, and suddenly all he wanted was to hold it in his hands, to study the thing Templeton spoke of. Jack turned and looked at the bundle in the jeep’s back.

Recognizing Jack’s longing, the Englishman reached back to collect the staff. He unwrapped it and held it out, admiring it with an appreciation that might have equaled Jack’s own. Glancing over while driving, Jack could look directly into the eyes of the serpent, aware of the fact that he was looking into the same jeweled eyes that, if the story was true, countless men and women had looked into in order to live.

Even as he thought it, he chided himself for his doubt. If past events had done nothing else, they had given him a unique perspective on the veracity of biblical claims—a perspective he suspected few people in the world could share. And as expected, he felt the twinge of guilt that often reared its head when he considered the gift he’d been given. Because while there had been no way to avoid accepting the faith his parents had taught him, since that time he and God had settled into an uneasy détente. And the things that kept him from considering the reason for the détente were the very things he feared losing in the process. His detachment, his irresponsibility, his beloved flippancy—they had defined him for so long that he didn’t know what he’d do if he lost them. And he was convinced that’s what would happen if he decided to practice what Espy called
spiritual maturity
.

“You believe it,” Templeton said, breaking into Jack’s thoughts.

“Believe what?” Jack asked.

“You can’t look into the serpent’s eyes like that and not believe the staff did what the Bible says it did.”

Jack didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted his eyes back to the staff, taking in the snake’s body, the detail of each scale, following the coil around the staff. The longer he looked at it—a luxury afforded by flat terrain and no traffic—the more something about it bothered him, although that realization did not come to him right away. He simply found that his eyes kept returning to the serpent’s tail.

“Yes, I believe it,” Jack said, the response requiring no further elaboration.

Templeton carefully rewrapped the artifact and returned it to the back seat.

For some reason, Jack was irritated that Templeton had secured the staff, yet he didn’t say anything. Still, he felt he’d been on the verge of figuring out something important and now whatever it was had suddenly fled.

He glanced down at the jeep’s center console, at the cellphone sitting in the cup holder. He wondered if they were close enough to Raballah to get a signal.

“Remember, you’re dealing with a government that is among the best in the world at clandestine operations,” Templeton said, his eyes still closed. “They know your name. Which means they know your friends’ names. And their phone numbers.”

Jack knew Templeton was right and it bothered him that he hadn’t thought of it—that he’d come close to making a huge mistake. If the Israelis were listening, then even using a public phone in Raballah would be a risk. They’d be monitoring Espy’s calls, regardless of the incoming number. He was running out of options.

However, there was one thing Jack had in abundance: friends in odd places.

The farther north Jack drove, the more the road began to look like a road, with the requisite signs denoting routes and destinations, and when Jack hit the P19 he took it, removing Raballah from the playbook. If Templeton noticed the change, he didn’t comment.

Two hours later, with Templeton legitimately asleep, they entered Medenine.

It had been years—prior to Jack beginning his teaching career at Evanston—since he’d been in the area, and on those previous occasions he remembered Medenine as a wonderfully eclectic place. He’d enjoyed touring the ghorfas, admiring the honeycomb structure of the ancient stone buildings that had served the people of the area for thousands of years. He hadn’t the time to revisit those tourist spots, but in his present circumstances the town offered him something of significantly greater value.

As they headed north, hitting the first of the foothills that hinted at mountains farther on, the air had cooled. Before reaching the city proper, he pulled off the P19 and onto a narrower unmarked road that took them up a gradual rise, following the curve of the road until a cluster of buildings came into view—small homes set in loose confederation against the sprawl of the city only fifty feet below.

Templeton was awake now and regarded the place without speaking. When Jack pulled to a stop in front of a nondescript home amidst other nondescript homes, the Englishman exited with him. Jack, staff in hand, started up the incline to the front door, which opened before he reached it. A man in a worn jalabiya stood in the threshold, eyes that looked as tired as Jack’s felt taking in the visitors. They touched Jack and moved off, but then returned and fixed on him. Jack offered a smile as recognition came to the Tunisian.

Being a wanderer by nature had bestowed on Jack a large and diverse collection of friends and acquaintances all over the world. Many of them he’d met only once. Yet he’d never met a man from whom he couldn’t ask a favor, and Marwen Saidani was one such man.

In truth, Marwen was more Romero’s friend than Jack’s, though the last time he was there Jack had stayed up late with both men, telling tall tales and smoking good cigars.

Marwen seemed pleased to see him, yet his smile was tempered by the lateness of the hour and because Jack and Templeton appeared to have been dragged through the desert by a rampaging camel. Once inside, Jack assuaged the man’s fears with broad strokes, telling him that all they needed was a place to spend the night—a request with which the Tunisian readily agreed.

After the exchange of a few more words, Jack was ushered into the back of the house, a dwelling larger and more modern than the last Tunisian home in which he’d stayed. A door on the left opened into a plain but clean room that Jack claimed as his own, closing the door behind him and leaving Templeton in his friend’s care. The room had its own bathroom, and Jack spent a long while scrubbing away the grime of the last few days with water as hot as he could stand. When he’d finished, he collapsed onto the bed. Less than a minute later he was asleep, stretched out on a mattress about as giving as a boulder. In his present state, though, he could have been sleeping in a five-star hotel and would not have noticed the difference.