Serpent of Moses (6 page)

Imolene understood the intricacies of this process but lacked the patience to deal with it this day. He leaned forward again.

“Is there anywhere else to get a car in town?” he asked.

This time the man did not even look in his direction.

“This is the only car,” he said.

Imolene returned a thoughtful nod and then turned to his fellow customer.

“Excuse me,” he said, placing his massive hand on the man’s shoulder. When the man turned, it was obvious that he had not taken a good look at his competition for the vehicle because his expression was pure irritation. It wasn’t until the much shorter man was forced to look up into Imolene’s cold eyes that his face changed.

“I need the car,” Imolene said. It was not a request as much as it was a simple fact.

“I already told you,” the merchant interjected. “I only have the one car.”

Despite the merchant’s protest, the Libyan customer appeared uncertain. Imolene took a half step forward, invading the other man’s space and pointedly ignoring the merchant. He leaned down so that his face was a scant few inches from that of the other man.

“I require the car and, consequently, I am going to leave with it. You may either allow me to do so or I will break each of the bones that I can reasonably assume you would use in the course of driving.” He allowed the threat to settle in before smiling and adding, “And I imagine the average person uses a great many bones in the process of piloting a manual Yugo with no power steering.”

Once he’d made the threat, he did not pull back but kept his face close. He could smell the odor of the man, the sweat of days. He watched a bead of sweat develop on the Libyan’s forehead and start a trail down the side of his face. Beneath this inspection the man finally caved. Without a word, or a look at the merchant, he swept his money from the counter and hurried to the door, giving Imolene a wide berth. Once he was gone, Imolene turned to the merchant, his calm expression unchanged.

His original customer gone, the proprietor appeared to weigh his options and returned the Egyptian’s look with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Okay, we have one car,” he said. “It is out front. Perhaps you’ve seen it?”

Despite the distance between them, Esperanza felt as if Romero were in the room with her. She could almost see him sitting at his desk, the thoughtful look on his face. It was an image that gave her comfort as she considered the ramifications of Jack not having answered his phone.

Romero had also tried to reach him, but as Esperanza knew it would, it went to voice mail. Then he’d called Sturdivant, who had repeated what he’d told Esperanza, while she stood in his office and listened to the telling for the second time.

On one hand, Esperanza felt silly for even entertaining the thought that something was wrong. Few people were better travelers than Jack. The man knew how to take care of himself, and with a history demonstrating that missing an appointment by a few days was a common occurrence, there was little reason to suspect anything but willful irresponsibility.

Except for the money.

Espy still had a difficult time imagining Jack pocketing a quarter of a million dollars. She was reasonably certain that nothing Jack had ever recovered—excepting some items from the Egyptian digs and those had gone to the Egyptian government—had commanded such a price.

And if she knew anything about Jack, it was that he had a heightened sense of punctuality where money was concerned. For a quarter of a million he would have been in London a day early.

“Regardless of what happened to you and Jack, what he does for a living is not usually dangerous,” Romero said, as if listening to her thoughts.

“You’d be surprised how many people don’t like him,” she said. “They’re scattered around the world.”

“Actually I’m not surprised.” Romero chuckled. “I was there when a number of those impressions were formed.”

Esperanza knew that, of course, but Romero had played the honest businessman for so long that she sometimes forgot about his days spent gallivanting around the globe. The exchange pulled a smile from her, although it faded almost immediately.

It wasn’t lost on her that she had come to London for the sole purpose of ending things with Jack, yet now the anger that had fueled her flight was transitioning into something else. She wouldn’t call it worry—not yet—but it was something close, despite that Romero was right—there were few real threats to someone in Jack’s profession.

“Reese is dead,” Romero said, again knowing where she had gone.

At that, Esperanza released a sigh. “I know. I also know that it’s been three years, and if anyone was going to come after me or Jack for what happened, they probably would have done it by now.”

All of them had looked over their shoulders for a long while, even after the billionaire had succumbed to the cancer he’d hoped to cure with the bones. After all, a man as powerful as Gordon Reese could have paid any amount to have the ones who had ruined his chance at an extended life killed—and such a directive could well have extended past the duration of that life. There came a time, though, when one had to stop living in fear, and Espy had chosen that path some time ago.

Still, she knew that Reese was not the only player in those events.

“If they’d wanted you dead, they would have done it when you were in Australia,” Romero said.

She knew this, but entertaining the thought that the secret organization that had protected Elisha’s bones for millennia was somehow involved in Jack’s disappearance played into her need for closure. In her estimation, these people who had played Jack against Reese were an open question, and she disliked not having answers. Even so, Romero was right again. They could have killed her and Jack, as well as anyone else who had helped the pair, at any time and yet had not done so.

“You know how he gets,” Romero said. “He likely began what he thought would be a simple expedition and it has become something more involved.”

“And so he turns off his phone?”

“Or he’s someplace with no cell reception.”

Esperanza grunted and leaned against the wall.

Romero did not say anything else right away, and Espy knew he was thinking.

“What is the name of Jack’s friend at the university?” he asked. “The one that worked for their government.”

“Duckett. Jim Duckett.”

“And he has a way of procuring manifests for plane flights?”

Esperanza’s eyebrows rose, but a frown replaced that expression in short order. “Except that we don’t know what flight he was on.” She paused and then added, “If he was even on one. For all we know, he was driving somewhere.”

Romero grunted an acknowledgment of that possibility but then asked, “What other choice do we have?”

Esperanza’s silence told both of them the answer to that.

Jim Duckett leaned back from the table and released a contented sigh. He didn’t know what it was about the pancakes produced by the grill staff in the student union, but even after years of weekly consumption, and a pancake count he couldn’t hope to recollect, they remained the pinnacle of perfection. Over the years, as the grill staff had turned over time and again without a fluctuation in pancake quality, he’d even stooped to bribing the cooks for their secrets, only to discover an undergraduate staff that was either as clueless as he was or who had formed a thin, buttermilk line of silence.

The meal finished, he reached for his breast pocket, his hand running over the two cigars he’d placed there when he left home that morning. However, before he could pull one out, his hand fell away. As habitual as the pancake consumption, the reflexive action of reaching for a cigar at the conclusion of a good meal remained something he could not shake.

As he leaned away from the table, he glanced around the student hangout. Evanston was, comparatively speaking, a small college, which meant that he often saw the same faces around him as he ate. Today, the place was near empty. The slowness of the place matched his own energy level, which had dropped precipitously over the last few months.

While downplaying it, he’d also made a few attempts to analyze it and the only thing he was able to come up with could be summed up in a single word:
boredom
. But the analysis did not venture much beyond that. He liked his job—and the perks that came with it—and couldn’t think of doing anything else. He suspected that it was just a phase and that it would pass. After all, one did not leave a position with the CIA for idyllic Ellen, NC, and the slower life of teaching at a small liberal arts college without occasionally recalling those more adventurous days with fondness.

Rather than allow himself to contemplate that further, he slid from the booth and reached for his tray—an action that still felt uncomfortable, even after three years. It had always pleased him to leave the tray on the table, knowing that Jack would take care of it along with his own. Like the reach for the cigar, busing his own tray had taken some getting used to.

As he headed for the trash can, he reflected on the fact that the time of year could have something to do with his mood. It was December, and the winter break was fast approaching—and the same time period three years ago had seen Jack Hawthorne teach his last class at Evanston.

On one hand, he was happy that the events that transpired had pushed his friend from teaching and back into the career he was meant to pursue. On the other hand, he had to take care of his own tray.

The air outside was crisp, and he contemplated lighting up a cigar on his way to his next class, but Evanston was not a large campus and the cigars he carried deserved a long enjoyment. He released a sigh and had just shifted his thoughts to his class when his phone rang.

“Duckey?” a woman with an accent said when he answered.

“With an accent like that, I can be whoever you want me to be,” he replied.

The fact that his statement was met with a laugh rather than indignation told him the voice belonged to the woman he thought it did.

“Jack wasn’t lying about you,” Esperanza said, and Duckey could feel the genuine warmth coming through the phone.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “In my experience, a good lie or two makes things a lot more interesting.”

That was followed by another laugh, and without ever meeting her, Duckey thought he was beginning to understand what it was about her that had made Jack swing by Caracas and pick her up three years ago. Because if Duckey knew anything about Esperanza and Jack’s shared history, it was that making that side trip—even though it had improved Jack’s chances of success in securing the biggest payday he’d ever imagined—was fraught with more danger than anything he’d faced during his pre-teaching profession.

“By the way, only my friends call me Duckey.”

In most other people that statement would have generated a pause. In this woman, though, it did nothing but fuel her mirth.

“Then I guess we’d better decide to get chummier than we already are,” she said. “Because that’s all I ever heard Jack call you, and I really don’t think I could bring myself to call you Jim.”

After a morning spent teaching the same classes he’d taught for years, followed by eating the same meal—however delectable—in the same place he’d always eaten it, this unexpected repartee was something he did not want to relinquish. However, the trade he’d practiced before assuming his present role forced him to analyze the various elements of the conversation—including the probable prompts for it—and despite his wishes, he found himself growing serious.

“What’s wrong, Espy?” he asked, also using the nickname made familiar by their shared friend.

Without so much as a pause she told him, and Duckey didn’t interrupt with a single question while she did so. In his experience, most good intel was generated by spontaneity. Duckey had risen through the ranks by letting his informants spill their guts and only asking clarifying questions when such were absolutely necessary.

Consequently, it wasn’t until Esperanza ran out of steam that the dean of the Humanities Department at Evanston University, who had long reached his destination but who remained standing on the walkway in front of it, said a word.

“And what makes you think that Jack not checking in is anything more than Jack being Jack?” he asked, unaware that his question echoed the one posed by Esperanza’s brother.

In truth, he didn’t need to hear the answer to the question. The simple fact that a woman who knew his friend well—likely better than Duckey knew him—was concerned, made him concerned. Nonetheless, he knew Jack. He knew that regardless of the personal and professional growth the archaeologist might have gone through over the last few years, somewhere inside existed the man who eschewed responsibility and commitment.

Duckey did not know where Espy was calling from but he pictured her on some street in Caracas. If he concentrated, he thought he could hear the sounds of traffic moving by her. She waited a long time before answering.

“Sometimes a person just knows something,” she said and the conviction in her voice swayed Duckey more than most other things might have.

“Okay,” he said with a nod she could not see. “What do you need me to do?”

When she told him, he couldn’t help feeling a measure of disappointment. Perhaps it was that he’d spent a portion of his morning bemoaning the static nature of his existence, and that this call from Esperanza Habilla signified something that might break the monotony. But discovering that he was only needed in order to procure and skim through flight manifests disappointed him.

Still, there was something about being asked to do a task—even a simple one—by a faraway woman with a foreign accent that had him quickly agreeing to help.

After ending the call moments later, he felt a return to the habits that had served him well for so long. And as he mounted the steps to the building where his students waited, he divested himself of everything but the facts. For analyzing facts was something he was good at.