“Director Tasset was running a covert counter-op with him,” Knox said, “which I only found out about a little while ago. He was working with the White House to secure the documents for the president. Had we known, Secretary McNamara and I never would’ve put him on this mission.”
Uzi sat down on the step and bowed his head. A long moment passed. “I didn’t know. I really thought we could trust him.”
“Mo only thinks he has parts of the codex and the scroll,” Vail said. “Even if he felt compelled to carry out his mission, it wouldn’t do the president much good.”
“But if he looked inside, he’d know he had everything,” Aksel said. “Brilliant move, Uzi. You’ve managed to fuck things up again.”
Vail expected Knox to say something in his operative’s defense, but the director remained silent — in effect, endorsing Aksel’s comment.
A moment later, the shrine door opened and closed. All heads swiveled in that direction, where DeSantos and Fahad were entering.
“Thank god,” Knox said.
Amen to that.
“Sorry I’m late,” Fahad said. “Stopped by a friend’s to get a ride to the checkpoint. Turns out he’s now with al Humat. Could’ve gone south real quick, but he got the call about Sahmoud and took off.” He stopped and seemed to realize that everyone was staring at him.
“You have something for us?” Knox asked.
He pulled the satchel off his shoulder and handed it to the director, who gave it to Tamar. She regloved and immediately went to work with her team.
They huddled around Tamar’s makeshift laboratory as the curator carefully unzipped the case and splayed it open. She pulled off a few layers of tissue paper and the pages of the Aleppo Codex stared back at them.
Aksel’s lips parted, while Knox pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger and leaned over the table to get a better look.
“Extraordinary,” Tamar said. The other conservationists concurred.
Tamar glanced at Fahad and gave him an appreciative nod, then moved on to the other item, a tubular shaped object similarly wrapped. She gently removed the paper and exposed a well preserved scroll. With gloved hands, she and two of the men carefully peeled back the first several inches.
Everyone leaned in for a glimpse. Tamar remained longer than the others, examining it with a jeweler’s loupe before straightening up. “More tests are needed, but it does, in fact, look like the genuine article.” She turned to the other woman, who was hunched over the codex.
She lifted her magnifying lens and spoke to Tamar. “I have to study this further in the lab, but I believe these are the missing pages of the Aleppo Codex.”
Uzi tapped Vail on her shoulder and gestured to the others to follow. He led them outside to a raised lookout over a one acre scale model of ancient Jerusalem and the Second Temple, shortly before its destruction in 70 CE — the precise time documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Uzi sought out Fahad, who was following a dozen feet behind. “Be right back,” he told Vail.
“A minute?” Uzi asked as he approached Fahad.
“Sure.”
Uzi gave him a shoulder hug. “Thank you, man.”
Fahad canted his head. “Hey, just doing my job.”
“No, not for that. For renewing my faith that your people and my people can get along. After what happened with Batula Hakim and her brother and all that other bad shit with Hamas and al Humat, I’ve had my doubts.”
“Believe me, I’ve had my moments too. I’m not without baggage.”
“So there’s hope.”
Fahad rocked back on his heels. “Well, now that we’ve solved the Israeli-Palestinian issue, maybe we should become diplomats and tackle other world crises.”
They both laughed.
“I’ve gotta go brief my boss,” Fahad said. “Not gonna be an easy conversation. Tasset’s going to be pissed.” He paused, then deadpanned, “You think there are any job openings at the Bureau?”
Uzi chuckled. “You’ll be fine.”
“See you on the plane.” He pulled out his phone and headed for a nearby bench.
Uzi rejoined Vail and DeSantos at the railing overlooking the Second Temple model.
Vail was slipping her phone back in her pocket. “Got an email from my boss. He just put a new file on my desk and wanted to know how soon I can get back to doing some important work — profiling serial killers.”
“What’d you tell him?” Uzi asked.
Vail smiled wanly. “Told him I can’t wait.”
Uzi took a deep breath of damp, cool air. “I hope we’re making headway against those cells back home. Santa — how long till you think we’ll hear something?”
“Spoke to Hot Rod on the way over here. The list of cells we got from Sahmoud’s was spot-on. We’ve got tac teams in eleven cities ready to strike simultaneously — FBI, marshals, local PD. Massive operation.”
“You think we’ll get ’em all?” Vail asked.
DeSantos considered that. “Eleven’s pretty damn good. But no. I don’t think we’ll get them all.” He stared into the darkness for a moment. “We dealt them some major blows. I think we’ll be okay for now. Things will be quiet. A few months, a year, two years. Who knows.”
“What about Connerly?” Uzi asked.
DeSantos shrugged. “NSA intercepted a call between his phone and a number the CIA had been tracking belonging to Hussein Rudenko. Don’t know what was discussed, and we can’t be sure it was Connerly, or Rudenko, on the line, but—”
“There’d be no reason for the president’s chief of staff to have a phone call with an arms dealer and terrorist who’s on the FBI most wanted list.”
“Without having a recording of the conversation,” Vail said, “you can’t prove Rudenko and Connerly were talking.”
“Not a smoking gun,” Uzi said. “But we might be on to something.”
“Or it might mean nothing,” Vail said.
Uzi shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidences where things like this are concerned. I think Sahmoud was telling us the truth.”
“Good luck with that,” DeSantos said. “We can’t put the president’s chief of staff in a black site room and interrogate him. There’ll be lawyers.”
That’s torture enough.
“It’s now Knox’s problem,” DeSantos said. “And the attorney general’s. When, and if, they find something, justice will be served. If not, Sahmoud is a really bad guy who did really bad things. He was a whole lot worse than Connerly. We take our wins where we can get them.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
Uzi pursed his lips. “I believe it was on a naval carrier on the Atlantic Ocean somewhere off the coast of England.”
They laughed again.
“You know,” Vail said, “if I didn’t know any better, it looked like you and Mo are in a good place.”
Uzi turned to DeSantos. “Yeah, well, hate to say I told you so.”
“But you’re gonna say it anyway.”
“No, no, no,” Vail said with a shake of her head. “I’m not buying that whole ‘I trusted him’ line, Uzi. I know you better than that. You embedded some tracking chip in Mo’s jacket, didn’t you?”
“Nope. I knew we could trust him.”
“Really,” DeSantos said.
“Trust has to start somewhere, Santa, and, really, we were trusting him with far more important things — our lives. I had faith in human nature, in Mo, to do the right thing. He’s a real person. True to himself. To who he is, who his family is. And was.”
Vail looked at him. “Remember what the rabbi said about truth? That there may not be such a thing?”
“I still think there are some truths in life.”