Fahad remained upstairs, ensuring guards did not enter the house once the shooting began. That they were in the basement, two levels down, lessened the likelihood the gunfire would be heard.
DeSantos tried the knob carefully, slowly, quietly, and determined it was locked. The door appeared to be solid metal — which meant it was heavy, likely reinforced, and impervious to being kicked in.
If this had been another time and place, Uzi would’ve set a charge of C4, taken cover, and blown it off its hinges.
They had reviewed the file photos of each wanted man. They would have milliseconds to identify them and shoot the others. How many were there? Impossible to be sure.
One mistake and they would lose the ability to detain and question two of the most dangerous criminals in the civilized world. However, Knox had made the overriding objective clear.
“We can’t shoot through this,” DeSantos whispered.
“Agreed. We should knock.”
DeSantos gave Uzi a look.
“I’m serious. Sometimes the simplest solutions are right in front of you.”
“I’ve got nothing better. Go for it.” DeSantos texted Vail and then moved out of sight.
Uzi lifted his balled fist toward the door and rapped on the cold steel surface.
“What,” someone shouted in Arabic from the other side.
“Message from Doka,” Uzi replied. “Important.”
The countless hours Uzi had spent in Shin Bet’s academy, then Mossad’s training facilities during ops preparation, and in the FBI Academy’s shooting house, flashed through his thoughts. His heart was pounding and his pulse was racing. He took a breath. The knob turned and the door swung in a second before Vail’s first gunshot rang out.
Uzi shouldered the door open. DeSantos swiveled into the room, took aim, and drilled a number of suited men in the chest.
Yelling
Chairs toppling
Frantic bursts of return gunfire
Uzi located his target and squeezed off several rounds, the sound deafening, the smell of cordite suffocating, obscuring visibility.
“Where is he?” Uzi yelled. “Where’s Sahmoud?”
Another two gunshots, then Vail burst in, crouched low with her Glock in the ready position.
Uzi moved deeper into the room and surveyed the carnage. Neither Sahmoud nor Rudenko was there. He pulled an AK-47 off the dead body of one of the downed security guards and tossed it to DeSantos.
He rooted out his satphone and saw an amorphous, unaccounted for heat mass behind the large desk near the far wall. Uzi hand signaled Vail as he moved cautiously toward the man.
A middle-aged male with a salt-and-pepper beard was seated on the floor, his back against a vertical row of wood file drawers. His right hand was pressed against his abdomen.
Assessing the threat and determining there was none, Uzi shoved the Glock in his waistband and knelt in front of the man.
“Kadir Abu Sahmoud, you’re a prisoner of the United States government.”
73
Vail came around the edge of the desk and studied Sahmoud. He was leaking blood from an abdominal wound and was in a great deal of pain. Given their covert status, there was no way to get him the kind of medical attention he needed to save his life. How long he had she did not know. Because of their training, Uzi or DeSantos could make a more accurate assessment.
“Get me to a hospital and I will make sure you are well compensated,” Sahmoud said through clenched teeth.
“Call Mo,” Uzi said. “Tell him we’ve got Sahmoud but not Rudenko.”
“Copy that,” DeSantos said as he removed his phone.
“The dumbwaiter,” Sahmoud said. “He’s … gone.”
Vail moved across the room and examined the small elevator. She craned her neck and looked up the shaft and saw that the car was on a level maybe twenty feet above her. Is Sahmoud telling the truth or is Rudenko hiding somewhere? As Vail turned to face the room, a group text arrived from Fahad:
infrared shows man moving away from
back of house on foot. cant pursue
Rudenko! Son of a bitch.
She glanced at DeSantos and shook her head. She replied and told Fahad to make sure there were no surveillance cameras — and if there were, to erase any recordings.
While DeSantos patted down the dead guards, Vail turned her attention to the primary objective and began a systematic search of the room. She did not have far to look: a walk-in safe behind the desk, a few feet from Uzi, was ajar. She pulled the six-foot-tall metal door open enough for her to enter and turned on her phone’s flashlight.
On the left side were a number of flat cases and assorted cardboard rolls, stacks of money of various denominations — shekels, dollars, pounds, euros. A large velvet pouch of uncut diamonds. Several canvases of what looked like Renaissance era paintings.
As she sifted through the contents of the shelves, she heard Uzi and DeSantos begin to interrogate Sahmoud.
Off to the right she saw a portfolio that was strikingly similar to the leather cases she had seen in the Louvre restoration vault. She set it on a small table in the center of the vault and carefully unzipped it.
Whoa. So this is the Aleppo Codex.
It was as the rabbis in Brooklyn had described: once bound, now mostly loose pages of about 10x13, dark brown ink on tan parchment, roughly thirty lines to a column, three columns to a page. The handwriting was so perfect it could have been typeset on a computer.
Her palms were sweaty, her heart still racing — but it was not just the residual adrenaline. She was holding one of the most important documents produced by mankind. It brought back memories of her first trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a young art history major and seeing Diego Velazquez’s oil on canvas, Juan Pareja.
The scroll?
Vail closed the portfolio and pulled off the metal endcap of a spiral wound cardboard shipping tube. She peered inside: another parchment, this one looking a good deal more fragile. She did not want to risk pulling it out for fear of damaging it. Vail opened three others — and while each contained what appeared to be valuable documents, none matched the description of a Dead Sea Scroll.
“How’s he doing?” Vail asked, poking her head out of the vault.
“Not very cooperative,” Uzi said. “He confirmed that Rudenko sold him the scroll. Rudenko bought it twenty-some-odd years ago from someone who smuggled it out of the Vatican.”
“So the Vatican got its hands on it?” Vail asked.
“They offered nineteen million dollars to get it back. Sahmoud made a better offer. No one knew who had it. He felt now was the time to sell because of what he’d been told about the peace negotiations.”
“He was right,” DeSantos said. He was standing beside the kneeling Uzi, the pilfered AK-47 in his grasp, legs spread. A position of readiness.
Vail whispered in DeSantos’s ear, “With the gunshots, even down here, there’s gotta be others on their way. And someone may discover the dead guard at the gate. Don’t know about you, but I don’t want any part of that.”
“Especially with Fahad watching the shop. What about the codex and the scr—”
“Got both.”
DeSantos nudged Uzi in the shoulder. “Boychick, we gotta go.”
“Take me with you,” Sahmoud said through a tight jaw. “I’ll pay you … Two million each.”
Uzi laughed.
Sahmoud winced. “Diamonds in the vault … worth twenty-five million. Take them … they’re yours.”
“They’re ours anyway,” DeSantos said. He lifted his phone and took a snapshot of their prisoner’s face. “We should leave him here.”