The Brotherhood Conspiracy (38 page)

Bohannon pulled out the English guidebook he purchased in Tripoli, studied the map on the inside flyleaf, and followed the rest of the weary and dusty tourists across a stone bridge and through the large, arched gate in the sixteen-foot-thick wall. Robed children ran after the knot of tourists ahead of him and Bohannon could hear their plaintive offers to provide “first-class” guide services.

“Perhaps I could assist you, sir?”

Bohannon jumped at the sound of a voice by his shoulder. He looked to his left and found a young man with hungry eyes looking him over.

“Please forgive my boldness,” the young man said, bowing slightly at the waist. “But there is no other way for me to offer my services as a guide.”

He was shorter than Bohannon, but not by much, and wore a crisp, white kaftan that failed to hide the bulked-up muscles of a body builder. Under his white kaffiyeh, his black eyes were bottomless. His smile was bright, but far too vibrant, as if he had painted it on this morning.

“I am Zaka Alaoui, a student at the university in Homs. This is one way
I help to pay for my studies. My knowledge of the castle is extensive and my English is without compare. Perhaps you would allow me to guide you? The castle’s passageways are labyrinthine and one is easily confused.”

Alaoui tried earnestly to appear at ease, deferential, a servant for hire. Bohannon took a step backward, out of the young man’s sphere of contact. Then he held up the guidebook and shook his head.

“Thank you, but I don’t believe I’ll need a guide.”

The young man’s painted-on smile turned down at the edges and his eyes hardened, sending a shiver up Bohannon’s spine in spite of the beating sun.

“Very well,” Alaoui said, backing away and bowing slightly, touching his fingers to his forehead. “May Allah go with you.”

Alaoui’s final words may have been a farewell, but, to Bohannon, the look on his face was more like a warning. Unsettled, but determined, Bohannon pulled out his map of the Krak, quickly got his bearings, and began his search for the castle’s library. Walking through the courtyard between the outer and inner walls of the castle, Bohannon was amazed at the wonder of this Crusader fortress. The outer, or curtain, wall was about twenty feet tall with a crenellated battlement running along its crest. It was fortified by thirteen towers spaced at the corners and along the sides of the wall. While formidable, the outer wall was dwarfed by the monumental size of the Krak de Chevaliers’ inner keep.

Across a narrow, separating moat, now filled in places with stagnant water, the inner walls of the castle rose eight stories tall and sloped away from the one-hundred-foot-thick base at an eighty-degree angle, making assault on the walls nearly impossible. Huge, half-round towers jutted from the inner wall halfway up its angled sides. If the Knights Hospitaller were forced to abandon the outer wall’s defenses, the higher inner walls would afford the castle’s defenders a perfect perch for raining death on invaders. And if an attacking army ever breached the massive inner wall, the interior of the castle was a maddening warren of narrow, zigzagging, vaulted passageways that could be sealed by dropping iron gates from the ceiling.

Checking his map, Bohannon measured his progress past the small Gothic chapel and entered a low, dark, narrow passageway with a severe upward grade. He emerged into the light on an overgrown platform that connected to another covered passageway and led to a spiral staircase that wound up into the central of the three powerful towers.

Bohannon bypassed the tower’s stairs and came out into the inner court of the keep. Turning left, he entered an elegant portico with seven rib-vaulted bays and followed the sun-dappled walkway to the Great Hall. Standing in the doorway, he checked his map once more. According to the guidebook, the Hospitallers library lay beyond the Great Hall, up another steep, narrow passageway. And, if the guidebook was correct, the French not only rescued the citadel and its priceless frescoes from the ravages of the local villagers, but also unearthed a library hidden by the Crusaders seven hundred years earlier. It was the library that lured Bohannon to Krak de Chevaliers.

As he turned to step through the door, Bohannon caught sight of a flash of white to his right. Zaka Alaoui stood motionless at the end of the porticoed walkway, no longer a painted smile on his face.

Egyptian Desert, West of St. Anthony’s Monastery

Rizzo was belted into the rear seat of the Jeep, vacantly staring at a tawny, treeless landscape he didn’t really see. The image in his mind was lying on a bed, back among those ochre buildings with the domes and narrow windows with arched tops. Neither of his rescuers uttered a word during the long drive into the morning. He didn’t care.

The Jeep lurched and pounded over a dusty, stone-covered hillock, slamming Sammy’s sore butt against the rock-hard seat and pulling his thoughts back to the present. Heckle and Jeckle were in the front seats, the scarves covering their heads whipping in the wind. Rizzo followed their gaze as they both looked to the west.

Like a beige cliff rising from the ground, billowing up and over itself, an enormous cloud of sand and dust rolled across the flat desert floor, covering everything it passed in a swirling fog.

The Jeep jumped forward, its engine whining a complaint. The old bucket of bolts raced across the desert floor, the cloud closing fast.

“Hold on!”

The abrupt voice jolted Rizzo’s attention back to the driver. He couldn’t see over the dashboard or out the windshield so he wasn’t prepared as his shoulders were pinned against the seat back and his head snapped backward as the Jeep collided with something, and lost its connection with the ground. Rizzo could feel the change in the weight, the displacement of the vehicle. It was floating.

Until it crashed heavily against its groaning springs, launching Rizzo against the restraint of the seat belt.

“Yo, Pancho Villa, where’d you learn to—” Before Rizzo could finish his sentence, the Jeep plunged into a dark cavern, the throbbing protest of its engine echoing off the cavern’s walls, competing in decibels with the screaming sandstorm that howled just outside the cave’s entrance.

Jebel Kalakh, Syria

What was once a great library was a dusty ruin. The rows of empty shelves attested to years of looting and unchecked weather.

“At one time—one point of history—was not this library a marvel?” said the curator to Bohannon. “So much knowledge in such a remote place. But was that not the same cause of its own destruction? Was there no one here to guard or care for the books?”

A small man, his robes sweeping the worn, stone floor, the curator wore a small, white, circular cap on top of his round, almond-colored head. The hat was as exposed to the elements as the Krak, and looked much less secure. He waved with the back of his hand to the small assemblage of books, scrolls, and pamphlets that occupied a lonely corner of the great library. Lonely . . . but well protected. “Only these survived.”

The documents were enclosed in a two-sided Plexiglas cube, the front and right sides of which formed a square in the corner of the room; a third piece of Plexiglas served as a cover, twenty feet off the floor and ten feet short of the arched, stone ceiling.

“A few only remain,” rasped the curator, “but are you pleased with what survived?”

Standing outside the climate-controlled enclosure, Bohannon scanned the shelves, looking for anything that might look familiar. “How were these saved?”

“Aaahhhh”—the curator sounded like he was gagging on his last breath—“how did they survive?” He pointed to the square stones on the floor. “Was it under here? Hidden, a stone vault? How many false tunnels protected them? Lost to time, but are these not treasures?”

Bohannon looked at the collection mere feet away and put his hand on the Plexiglas.

“I may help you?”

He didn’t turn. “I’m looking for a document—probably not a book—that came here from the Dar al-Ilm in Tripoli.”

“From the House of Knowledge?”

Bohannon nodded his head, his eyes still scanning the shelves. “It may be a scroll or a scroll holder. I don’t know exactly. But I think if I could get close to those books in the case, if it’s there, I should be able to identify it.”

“Inside?”

Bohannon turned to the curator. The small man’s eyes were bulging. A look of horror covered his face.

“That is the only way for me to know.”

“No . . . no . . . none can enter,” said the curator, shaking his head. “How do you know it is here? How would you know it?”

Good question.
Bohannon wondered that himself.
Divine inspiration?

“Do you know Phoenician?” Bohannon asked.

The curator stepped back and regarded Bohannon with a new level of interest. “You do?”

“Enough to know what I’m looking for,” said Bohannon. “It’s probably a brass mezuzah, etched on the outside. Somewhere, there are probably the letters aleph and resh on its face.”

The curator’s head spun around so quickly, checking the length and breadth of the Great Hall, that he almost lost his hat.

“What do you know? Why are you here? What do you want?”

Bohannon took a step closer to the curator. “I want to get inside and look through that collection. Then, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Settling his hat squarely on the top of his head, the curator stepped to the large, double doors that created an air lock. He pulled a key as long as a dagger from the folds of his robe, opened a huge, ancient padlock, and slid the first door along a sealed runner. Both men stepped into the airlock. Bohannon was about to remark on the dated security when the curator placed his palm on a small LCD pad and leaned close to a lens that scanned his retina.

The second door swung open. The smell of old, dry leather—like the smell of his grandfather’s attic—lured them in.

With his robe dragging behind him, the curator crossed through the enclosed space and stopped in front of a bookcase with drawers in its two bottom sections.
He creaked open the top drawer, its wooden surface polished by a thousand hands, reached inside, and pulled out an etched, brass mezuzah. It was larger than the mezuzah that had launched their journey—probably twice as large, about four inches in radius and about eighteen inches long. Even though this was what he was looking for, Bohannon was still startled to see it right before his face, held out in the hands of the curator.

“This is what you seek, perhaps?”

Bohannon stepped forward as the curator turned the brass cylinder over in his hands. “The aleph and resh you seek?”

There it was, Abiathar’s hallmark, the Phoenician letters aleph and resh surrounded by a circle. Bohannon took another step and lifted his hands to receive the tube from the curator. “Yes.”

But the little man pulled the mezuzah away, and held it back toward his body, out of Bohannon’s reach. “Is it the mezuzah, or what it protects, that you seek?”

Bohannon looked at the curator with the baffled fury of a spurned lover. “What?”

The curator took a small step backward. “What do you seek? This, the holder? Or what was inside?”

“I . . . well . . . I don’t know,” Bohannon stammered, anxiety and frustration bubbling up to the surface of his emotions. “Both, I guess. What difference does it make?”

A sigh escaped from the curator’s chest . . . an edgy rattle of a sigh.

He held the mezuzah away from him and grasped the metal bar that spanned about three-quarters of its length—a three-sided square piece of etched bronze fitted tightly to the outer surface of the mezuzah. The curator looked at Tom with the compassion of a coroner as he pulled the scroll holder’s handle away from the mezuzah’s surface.

“A great deal of difference, don’t you think?”

The handle separated from the mezuzah, but there was nothing there—no scroll attached to the handle—nothing to unroll. “Gone . . . a very long time ago, I believe.”

Bohannon looked at the empty space between the mezuzah and its handle—and that was how he felt. Empty. All this way—what was he doing?

Hunger gnawed at Bohannon’s stomach as furiously as frustration gnawed at his emotions. He walked along the ramparts of the Krak de Chevaliers in a trance. After a frustrating and unrewarding hour examining the nondescript decorations on the surface of the larger mezuzah, he emerged from the library in a state of mental fog and in an area of the castle that he didn’t recognize. The labyrinthine twists had brought him to an unknown corner in a dead-end tunnel, except for a stone stairway that led up, into the light. He climbed the solitary staircase and found himself on the far, southeast corner of the castle’s walls, on the opposite end of the fortress from the main gate.