“What is on this?”
“It’s just a back-up for my computer. Never know when a computer will crash and all your work goes down the tubes with it.” Marcus smiled. The guard held the drive in his fingers.
“No! Nooooo…” came a wail from the bus behind them. The men turned to see a woman being dragged from the bus by another guard. A large man and a frightened boy were behind her. “Please!” She shouted. “Our son needs medicine! He’s sick, diabetic. We must go to Cairo!”
The guard next to Marcus handed him the flash drive. “Enter! Move on!” he ordered. The men hustled back to assist the guard with the screaming woman and her family.
Marcus got in the car and pulled away, glancing in the rearview mirror, his mouth dry, back muscles knotted. Alicia let out a chest full of pent up air. “Paul! What the hell were you thinking? That flash drive tucked away in your freakin’ pocket. Imagine if he’d taken it.”
“But he didn’t.”
“You couldn’t have known that. A twenty-something Egyptian border guard was patting me down while the other held the future of the world in the palm of his hands for a few seconds.”
“If he knew what it was…what would he do?”
“What could he do?”
“The right thing.”
Alicia said nothing for a minute. She looked out the window. “How long do you think it’ll take us to cross the Sinai Peninsula?”
“I’m hoping that when the sun comes up in the morning, we’ll be across the Suez Canal.”
An hour later, Marcus drove west into the heart of the Sinai Peninsula. The sun crept low over the horizon and highlighted the weathered, treeless hills with a reddish glow. Marcus gazed at the vast land, bleak — life long since herded from its deserts and bare mountains. The land seemed tired, as if it harbored an old soul. It had the odd feel of something foreign, similar to the abstract desolation of the moon. It was romantic from afar, but up close it had the harsh and craggy face of a landscape plowed from thousands of years of painful history.
“Look at that,” Alicia said, pointing toward a camp less than fifty feet off the road.
“They’re Bedouins. Dinner time, maybe.”
There were tents scattered in the midst of small clapboard homes of plywood and corrugated steel. Three camels knelt and ate grass piled beside them. Bedouin men, women, and small children sat around a fire. They ate, drank tea and talked, wood smoke curling into a dark, cherry-colored sky.
Marcus looked at the smoke and thought about the history of the region, the burning bush, wandering tribes of Israel, the plagues of Egypt, a divine covenant of a promised land, and an Exodus led by Moses. Now the old earth, the miles of rocks and sand, was a place gone astray in a fracture of time, covered by rust left over from the Iron Age. The sand was saturated in the soft glow of embers renewed in twilight from the fading burgundy sun.
Alicia looked at the immensity of the desert, the terrain now the reddish color of a robin’s breast. She glanced over at Marcus. “You’ve been very quiet. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Thanks, again, for what you did for Brandi. Paul, what we’re going through…it’s mysterious and it’s powerful. I’m not sure how and why I’m with you at this moment, but I just want you to know how honored I am to be with you.”
Marcus looked at her for a second. “I’m glad you’re here, too. I just want to keep you safe, and that seems harder and harder to do.”
“I imagine we’re driving through some of the area where Moses led his people to the Promised Land.”
“Probably. Maybe it’s that covenant, that promissory inference that has led to the lines drawn in the sand.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other message we’re carrying on the flash drive is from what Daniel wrote. The information gleaned by Newton, it’s the exact opposite of so much today. Its message is opposite from a divided Jerusalem. It’s contrary to the gluttony and greed in much of the world — the evil built through the centuries by the heirs of those who call themselves the Circle of 13.”
“Yeah, but for people like Jonathon Carlson, he can pretend to hear, speak and see no evil. But if you’re doing all three, you can’t play a shell game when electrons move your money and messages. Give me a few hours of quiet time, and I can turn the tables on more than one of Carlson’s off-shore accounts.”
“Maybe Robin Hood had it right.”
“After we get to Stockholm…what then, Paul? We’re seeing a seismic movement in world events, ones that seem to be prophesies…but we don’t know…I’ll just say it. We don’t know when the final days will occur.”
Marcus said nothing. He glanced at his rearview mirror.
Alicia said, “Do you know something, have you seen…something you aren’t telling me?”
“There’s a missing link. If we get lucky, and if I’m right, we might find it.”
NINETY-SEVEN
Marcus first saw the lights at 4:03 a.m. He’d driven that last eighty miles through the Sinai Desert with no sign of cars, people, towns or life. Nothing. Nothing but a cloudless, inky black sky filled with the shimmer of stars. Alicia slept in her seat, knees pulled up, and her head resting on a small pillow she’d bought six hours earlier.
The road was long and straight. Marcus looked in the rearview mirror and saw the headlights far away, on the edge of the flat topography. Must be at least ten to twelve miles back.
But the car was gaining on him — gaining with each minute. Marcus accelerated, moving the speed from sixty kilometers-per-hour to more than eighty. Maybe just someone in a hurry to get across the peninsula. Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose and shook away fatigue. He looked at the curved moon over the desert. The moon resembled a lopsided smile hanging in the sky just over the tops of sand dunes.
Within minutes, the car was less than a kilometer behind him. He pushed the speedometer needle to ninety. The headlights grew closer. “All right,” he whispered. “I’ll slow down and you can pass me.” He lifted his foot from the accelerator pedal and gradually let the speed drift back down to eighty.
The headlights came nearer, and the high beams flashed on, light filling the rearview mirror. “Go on and pass me, pal,” Marcus muttered.
Alicia opened her eyes. “Is everything okay?”
“Someone in a hell of a hurry is riding our tail. They won’t pass.”
Alicia glanced in the side-view mirror the second it was shattered by a bullet. “They’re shooting!” She ducked down in her seat.
“Hold on!” Marcus cut the wheel to the left and spun around in the road. The pursuing car passed. A man in the passenger side fired another shot. A bullet went through Marcus’s back windshield. He drove onto a rough side road. Unpaved. He gunned the engine, dirt and rocks scattering in the night air. He steered toward massive sand dunes and rocky hills.
Alicia turned. “They’re coming back!”
Marcus said nothing, gripping the wheel. The Honda bounced hard through deep potholes the width of trashcan lids. “We can’t outrun them! Maybe there’s someplace to hide in those hills. Keep your head down!”
Alicia braced herself, both hands against the dashboard, head lowered. Marcus crisscrossed around old growth trees and huge boulders. He drove behind a large outcropping of rocks that led up to cliffs. He shut off the headlights and stopped the car. “Get out!”
“Where can we go?”
“Into those hills.”
“I see their headlights! They’re getting closer.”
Marcus reached for the Beretta he had slipped back between the seats. He ripped the tape and spear from under the dash. “Come on!” They ran up a sand dune and over to rocky cliffs laced with dark crevices.