Serpent of Moses (21 page)

“I’m in a bad spot here so I have to be quick,” Jack said.

“Understood,” Romero returned.

“I spoke with Duckey’s wife and she told me in a roundabout way that an old friend of his at the Company is going to pull him out of Libya.”

“That’s good news,” Romero said. “Can I take it from his bride’s circumspectness that she believes her phone is also being monitored?”

“I think that’s a valid assumption.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw the desk clerk growing impatient. He would know the call was long distance, and good customer service only went so far.

“That’s why I think we need to listen to him and not try to find him ourselves. He’s right—we’d get picked up the minute we got off the plane.”

“So what do we do in lieu of that?” Romero asked.

“That’s the million dollar question,” Jack said and he heard Romero snort in response.

“Esperanza said you won’t leave Tunisia without the staff and that you have brokered some deal to make that happen. And if you do not mind my being frank, I think that cheapens what has been done on your behalf.”

It wasn’t the comment that struck Jack so much as the man who’d made it. In years past, Romero had accompanied him on many an outing, and while danger hadn’t become an element in Jack’s work until the last few years, the Venezuelan had always possessed a sense of adventure that made him the equal to any challenge. He wondered, as he considered his response, if Romero’s stance indicated that he too was entering a more mature phase.

The clerk was looking at him again—a more pointed look now. Jack ignored him.

“I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “But even you have to admit that this isn’t just a treasure hunt anymore. I’ve seen men killed for this thing and now we have someone tapping our phones and sending Duckey on the run. Are you going to tell me that you just want to walk away without seeing this through?”

While pleading his case, he’d turned away from the clerk to avoid seeing the man’s dour expression. But when he turned back, he saw that the look on the Tunisian’s face had changed. He seemed to be hanging on Jack’s every word.

“Except that you are ready to risk your life for something that is not even whole,” Romero said.

“What . . . ? How did you know the staff was separated into pieces?”

“Surely Espy told you about Cyme.”

Confused, Jack said, “I’m not following. What about Cyme?”

He heard fumbling on the other side of the line and the next voice he heard was Espy’s.

“There are two pieces,” she said.

“I know,” Jack said. “It’s missing part of its tail.”

“The other piece is in Cyme.”

Jack paused. “That, I didn’t know,” he finally said.

“Which is what you get when you decide to travel without a linguist,” she chided.

“Believe me. If I have the opportunity to make a choice like that again, I’ll think it through a little better. Now, do you want to explain?”

Espy did, beginning with their discovery of the Gafat text around the symbols and the subsequent discovery of the second destination. By the time she finished, Jack felt thrilled for the discovery and irritated that he hadn’t made it himself.

“Al-Idrisi was a crafty one,” he said with admiration. “I never would have known about the location of the second piece.” At the clerk’s puzzled look, he put a hand over the phone and said, “Al-Idrisi hid one of the symbols we need in order to find the second part of the staff, using a language that no one’s spoken in hundreds of years. But an associate of mine just so happens to speak practically every language known to man, so she was able to figure it out. Are you with me?”

The clerk nodded to indicate he was on board, but judging by his expression Jack thought he was just saving face.

“Good. Try to keep up,” Jack said before turning his attention back to Espy. “So we head to Cyme,” he said, and despite the fact that he thought she shared his enthusiasm, her silence suggested she wasn’t ready to head to Turkey just yet.

“What about Duckey?” she asked.

It was a legitimate question—probably the only question she could have asked that stood a chance of derailing the train.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told your brother. There’s no way any of us are getting into Libya—at least not quickly. Yeah, we could probably sneak in across the border, but what would we do after we got there?”

“I don’t know,” Espy admitted. “But it just doesn’t feel right to look for the second piece of the staff when we don’t know what’s happened to him.”

Jack didn’t begrudge her those feelings, because he shared them. Duckey was a close friend, and the thought of anything happening to him because of something Jack had done sickened him. He’d watched friends die before and would give anything to never have something like it happen again. Yet he knew there was nothing he could do to help the man. The CIA had sent help and the U.S. government was in a significantly better position from which to render aid. Too, the thought that kept coming to his mind was that finding the rest of the staff would put an end to all of it.

He shared this with Espy, the only person in the world who could understand, because she’d lived through so much with him.

“Alright,” she said after Jack had given her time to consider. “How are you going to get to Turkey? I know you said you’ve worked something out, but they’re not going to let you take a rare artifact out of the country.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. I’ll find some way of getting into Turkey. Why don’t you and your brother go and I’ll call you when I get to Istanbul.”

He could sense Espy’s hesitation.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I’ll meet you in Istanbul within two days.”

He knew there was no certainty he could offer her, and Espy was strong enough not to require any. What was becoming clear to Jack—and it was something that should have been clear to him long ago—was that she required him. And he was starting to remember that it was a shared need.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“For what?” she asked, although she needn’t have.

“For walking away again.”

She could have told him that he hadn’t done that—that they were still together these three years later. But it wouldn’t have been the truth and both of them knew it.

“I love you,” he said, meaning every word.

“I’ll see you in Istanbul,” she replied quietly and then the line went dead.

Jack stood holding the phone to his ear for a long while. When he finally came back from where he’d been, he turned to hang up the phone and found the desk clerk waiting with expectation.

“She said she’d see me in Istanbul,” Jack said.

He couldn’t tell if that answer satisfied the man. He didn’t even know if it satisfied
him
.

He left it at that, offering the clerk a tired smile and walking away.

When Boufayed walked into the room, he was already in a poor mood, having made no gains in locating the hidden American agent. He’d taken his frustration out on those around him and he could see that knowledge on the face of the technician who turned in his direction.

He was less familiar with the Al Bayda office than he was with the one in Tripoli, but he could see that the technical analysis unit was almost as advanced as the one in the capital. Even in Tripoli, though, he rarely visited this room, even if he appreciated the information it provided. He knew that the hum of the servers, the clicks of multiple fingers dancing over keyboards, and the playback of recorded conversations were a music of sorts that, when worked over by those with the proper skill set, produced a symphony. Simply put, he had too much to do to spend time observing the accumulation and analysis of raw data—data that would make it to his desk at some point if the men and women studying it determined it was worth his review.

At present, the data that had come in—that continued to come in—was worth the personal touch.

The room he entered was sealed off from the rest of the floor, and the entire ten-meter length of the far wall was lined with flat-screen monitors. Below the monitors ran a large table with keyboards spaced evenly along its length. In front of each keyboard sat a technician, wearing headphones and watching the screen in front of them with clinical interest. Some of them looked back as Boufayed entered, but only one gestured for him to approach.

Boufayed stood behind the technician, watching the dark image on the screen. He could see a bed, and someone beneath the blankets, although it was too dark in the room for Boufayed to tell much more than that. After watching for a time and seeing no movement, not even the rise and fall of a blanket to tell him that the man was breathing, he addressed the technician.

“Let me hear the call,” he said.

The technician’s hands flew over the keys and the image on the monitor changed. The room was lighter and he could see a man sitting at a desk near the wall opposite the camera. He could see only the man’s back.

Freezing the image, the tech handed back his headphones and, once Boufayed was ready, set the scene in motion. Boufayed listened to the entire exchange, though he could only hear one side of the conversation. As much as they’d tried to procure the technology that would allow them to crack the security protocols used on the phones the Americans issued to their agents, they had been unsuccessful. And for calls such as the one he was watching and listening in on, the people who worked in this office were tasked with filling in the part of the conversation that went unheard.

As Boufayed listened a second time, he tried to forget about what he’d been told by his analyst. But willful ignorance was a difficult skill to master. Still, even with his attempts to prejudice what he’d heard, he found himself agreeing with the analyst’s assessment.

He returned the headphones to the technician.

“It’s not much,” the young man said, “but there are a few phrases that make me believe he’s about to try to help someone get out of the country.”

Boufayed nodded. He’d heard the tells as well. Again, he thought his analyst was correct: an extraction attempt was in the works and he could think of no one who needed that service more than a missing CIA agent.

What gave him pause, however, was the conversation he’d heard between Esperanza Habilla and a man named Jack. He assumed he was the missing archaeologist who’d been referenced in other calls. Boufayed was still amazed that she’d spoken so freely on a phone that she should have suspected was no longer useful for private conversations. Her slip had been a boon to the Libyan, for it had provided information he would never have been able to get otherwise. It almost convinced him to suspend the hunt for Jim Duckett. He wondered how much more he could hope to learn from the man, and what that information would cost him in resources. More often than not, though, good information was worth considerably more than the cost to obtain it.

Even so, the decision to use the new information to apprehend Jim Duckett was not an easy one. The man who appeared on the monitor, the picture having switched back to a real-time feed, had cost them a great deal of time and money, which had been spent toward the development of a surveillance system that could track his every move. It wasn’t often that an intelligence agency had the opportunity to monitor the movements of another nation’s agent working in the field. One did not make the decision to burn that resource without good reason.

What tipped the scales for Boufayed was Agent Robert Ingersoll, whose handlers felt that Jim Duckett was worth the risk to Ingersoll’s painstakingly cultivated placement. If they valued Duckett that highly, how could he not?

“He will have to make contact with Duckett in order to arrange the extraction,” Boufayed said.

“Of course, sir,” said the technician, but he was speaking to Boufayed’s retreating back.

“You have no idea how much I appreciate this, Tom.”

Tom Fitzpatrick broke into a laugh, which told Duckey that, on the contrary, the man did know how much Duckey appreciated it, and that a recompense of some sort had been factored into the assistance. Once the laughter subsided, he said, “As soon as they get you in, you and I are due for a long talk. Checking someone’s records is one thing, Jim. Using the Company’s resources to smuggle you out of Libya is another thing entirely.”

“I understand,” Duckey said.

“You know I’m always willing to help out,” Fitzpatrick said. “But whatever it is you’ve got yourself mixed up in has you asking for more resources than you ever did when working for me. I can’t keep doing this without someone asking questions.”

“And I’ll have the answers to each and every one of those questions as soon as I can shake your hand,” Duckey promised.

“Fair enough.”

After Duckey ended the call, he turned his attention to the street, waiting for the signal from whomever Fitzpatrick had sent. He wore the headphones he’d picked up in the cab that had stopped at the corner early that morning, and that he’d ridden around the block in once before returning to his room.

In Duckey’s mind, the operation had already taken too long. In his day, he would have been in and out in less than sixty seconds. He was a firm believer that no amount of planning, checking and rechecking could take the place of rapid deployment and a precision extraction. Still, he knew it wasn’t his game anymore; things had changed and he could only sit back now and let younger men do what they’d been trained to do.

His hand drifted to the gun on the table—the other item left for him in the cab. It would be untraceable, the serial number filed away. Tom had broken several rules in getting it to him, and Duckey knew he owed his friend for that too.

Less than two minutes after he’d finished with Fitzpatrick, Duckey saw a white Ford Taurus roll up, parking a few buildings away in a spot near the truck with the flat tire. According to the company name and information on the door panel, the car belonged to a local flower shop. Yet he couldn’t see past the tinted windows to confirm that. That need was removed from him, though, when his phone rang.

“We’re ready” was the simple message, spoken in perfect English.

“On my way,” Duckey replied.

Letting the curtain fall back into place, Duckey rose and headed for the stairs, which he was forced to take at normal speed regardless of how much he wanted to reach the flower-shop car, as every step nearly sent him tripping over his dress. He wondered if the full Muslim wraps were now standard Company procedure or if Tom was just having fun with him. Even if the latter was true, he suspected he deserved it for what he was putting his friend through.

When he stepped outside, he saw that two of the car’s occupants had exited. They weren’t quite heading in his direction but were approaching circumspectly, a technique that allowed them to scan the area for threats while also leaving the exit point of their cargo a mystery until the last moment.

Though both men were dressed like locals, Duckey could see the telltale sign of a cord running from one of the men’s ears to somewhere inside his jacket. Shaking his head, Duckey resolved to give these two a little advice about the art of remaining invisible. Of course he would wait until they’d ferried him somewhere a bit friendlier before doing so.

Duckey started for the Taurus, navigating his way through the people passing in both directions, although he was having a hard time seeing through the small space between the top of his nose and his eyebrows. He had no idea how the women here wore these things. And to make matters worse, he was sweating badly.

The car wasn’t far away, but in the short distance he’d traveled he found that he was drawing a number of looks from the locals. He kept his head down, eyes forward, and resisted the urge to adjust his dress where it was riding up. Most passersby seemed willing to give the very large, perspiring Muslim woman a wide berth and he was at least grateful for that.

He glanced at the agents, who apparently having seen that all was going according to plan, turned and headed back to the car. Duckey frowned beneath his veil at the break in procedure.

It was when the agents reached the car that Duckey—still some distance away—first felt it. He couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was he was picking up on, only that it didn’t feel right. In his former career, he’d become convinced that the truly good agents were those who learned to listen to their instincts, and then to act on them. And it seemed to him that the men who’d come to collect him were not paying close enough attention to their surroundings.

He never heard the car coming. One moment there was nothing and in the next a dark sedan had passed him and come to a stop in front of the Taurus, startling the agents who were about to get inside the car. The doors of the sedan flew open and Libyan agents piled out—three of them, their guns drawn. As Duckey watched, it became clear that at least one part of the training the younger generation hadn’t missed was the part about setting down their weapons when faced with a stronger opposing force.

The Libyans hadn’t spotted him. He’d frozen on the sidewalk, but that alone didn’t give him away. Most of the people who had been passing by when the sedan came racing up had also stopped to watch what was happening.

Duckey continued to watch as the men Tom had sent were thrown against the Taurus and roughly frisked, and he knew he was watching his best chance of getting out of the city—out of the country—disappear. And that made him angry.

Gathering up the folds of his dress, Duckey stalked forward. The crowd of bystanders across the street began to notice him. When he reached the center of the action, one of the Libyans looked over and, seeing a woman in full robes, looked away again. Then, a moment later, something must have registered because he looked back—just in time to meet Duckey’s fist with his nose. He went down like a bag of cement, and when the other Libyans saw what had happened—seeing a Muslim woman with a clenched fist standing over their downed colleague—they hesitated. That was all that Duckey needed.

He bull-rushed the nearest one, releasing a decidedly unfeminine roar as he drove him into the side panel of the sedan. Before the Libyan could slip to the ground, Duckey released him and turned his attention to the remaining Libyan agent. Duckey hadn’t been quite quick enough; the Libyan had his gun out and trained on him. But his hand was trembling.

Duckey reached out and wrapped his strong fingers around the man’s hand, pushing the gun down and to the side and then using his other hand to bring the Libyan in close, until the man’s nose was an inch away from Duckey’s own. He looked into the man’s eyes and saw nothing but raw fear. Then the gun fell to the street and the Libyan pulled himself loose, turned and ran away.

When it was over, the people gathered along the sidewalk began clapping. Breathless, Duckey acknowledged the crowd’s applause with a nod of his head, his smile hidden by the veil. He went to the men who’d been sent to take him someplace safe. They both looked dumbfounded.

Duckey clapped one on the shoulder. “That’s how it’s done, boys,” he said, then slipped into the car, making sure to gather up his dress before shutting the door.

When Boufayed reflected back on the events of the last week, he could see various points at which he could have made different choices. With so many avenues that might have benefited from his focus, there was no need for him to show more than a passing interest in a German historian, or decide to dive into the presence of a retired CIA operative in Al Bayda. He could have selected from an almost endless supply of cases and worked any of them to satisfactory results. But he’d selected the cases he had—or perhaps they had selected him—and now he had to either benefit or suffer from them.

He’d reassigned the agents who had failed in their attempt to bring Duckett in. While Boufayed was alive, they would see nothing but desk duty. What made things worse was that the failure had sent two other agents into the wind; all of them were either at the embassy or had found another means of flight from the country. All that was left for him was to report his failure to the undersecretary, who was unlikely to punish Boufayed but who would realign his ever-changing hierarchy of senior agents.

He had almost resolved to dial the phone when one of the agents who still remained in his favor entered the office. Boufayed made a motion for the man to sit.

“What do you have?” he asked, nodding at the paper the man held.

“Information about the place Jim Duckett mentioned on his phone call to his associate in Milan,” the man said. “Cyme. It is the ruins of a Greek city in Turkey. We have reviewed the available literature and there is no reason to think that it holds anything of value.”

Boufayed processed that information while the agent sat in silence. Boufayed knew the man well, knew that he would have performed his due diligence. However, what Boufayed understood was something that one could seldom gain through research. Rather, a man needed to see a number of years spreading out behind him in order to see that there were things one could not prove in order to believe.

“We are going to Turkey,” he said in his usual abbreviated style.

He could see the order take his man by surprise, but he recovered quickly. Rather than ask questions, he rose and exited the room, on his way to carry out Boufayed’s directive.

After he was gone, Boufayed wondered why it was that men, even when they knew what they were doing was a foolish thing, continued to do that thing. He, of course, knew the answer to that. It was because all that a man needed was a single occasion when the performance of his action did not produce a foolish result. A single such instance could carry a man for a long while. Great accomplishment was not without great risk.

He sat at his borrowed desk and pondered that.

Jack stepped off the plane and into what might have been the busiest airport terminal he’d ever seen. He’d never had occasion to fly into Istanbul, despite the many times he’d passed through the city. As he walked through the concourse, he took it all in, enjoying it in a way that only someone who truly loved to travel could do.

As near as Jack could tell, he was only fifty or so miles away from the second piece of the staff, which pleased him beyond measure. He wondered if the Israeli agents on the plane felt it too—the end of the quest approaching. He hadn’t noticed anyone on the plane, at least not anyone he recognized as someone assigned to keep an eye on him, but he would have bet a great deal of money that there was more than one.

He had already passed through customs, armed with the paper that told anyone who cared that he was allowed to carry the long serpent pole around with him. Once he finished there, he passed through the regular security checkpoint, and when he stepped past the part of the walkway where he could no longer turn back without facing the wrath of the security staff, Jack saw a flurry of movement and then something flew at him with enough force to cause him to nearly drop his carryon. By the time he processed what had happened, he’d already instinctively wrapped his arms around Espy. He was the first to let go, although she wasn’t quite ready and held on for a while longer. When she finally pulled back, Jack found himself pulled into another embrace, one of a more bone-crushing variety.