“And I still think you were at risk of being played a fool.”
“I made sure he wasn’t,” DeSantos said.
Uzi tilted his head. “What are you talking about?”
“I hedged our bets. Sorry, Boychick. Too much at stake. I took the active tag chip out of my satphone and slipped it into Fahad’s satchel right before we left the house. Need be, we could track it.” DeSantos chuckled. “Of course, I wasn’t anticipating cloud cover.”
Uzi leaned back against the railing. “So you’re saying that you didn’t trust my judgment.”
DeSantos considered that. “Faith is powerful, but at the end of the day, we’re just people. And people approach things with their own biases.”
Vail grunted. “Kind of like what the rabbi said about truth. We see things through our own lens. We think what we’re doing is right.”
“But others may not see it that way — and they may be wrong. So I needed an insurance policy that these historic treasures were not only placed in their rightful place but that they were not used as blackmail in peace negotiations. Those were our orders.”
“If Mo figured out that you’d given him everything,” Vail said, “and if he wanted to turn it all over to the Agency, and if he knew about the chip, he could’ve ditched your tech and disappeared.”
DeSantos nodded slowly. “Then I guess in the end, it all came down to trust. And some luck.”
Knox came up behind them as DeSantos’s phone rang. He excused himself, pulled out his cell, and took a few steps away.
Knox placed a hand on Uzi’s shoulder. “Thank you both for a job well done.”
“What will come of the scroll?” Vail asked.
Knox looked out over the brightly lit model of ancient Jerusalem. “They’re going to store it in the museum vault and keep it quiet. Their goal was always to bring it home. Disclosure of its contents was never part of the plan.”
“Do you believe it’s possible to keep it under wraps?” Vail asked.
“I know Prime Minister Wolff,” Knox said. “Making it public, causing harm, that’s not what he’s about. The director general told me it wasn’t their place to release any ancient text that would denigrate, in any way, Christianity’s belief structure. No one would benefit from that. Looking at it pragmatically, it’d drive a wedge between Judaism and the Catholic Church, requiring decades, if not centuries, to heal. I’m sure the prime minister doesn’t want that to happen. Neither does the Vatican. There’s a lot going on here.”
“That means we’re sworn to secrecy as well.”
“That goes for the entire mission, Agent Vail.” Knox leaned both hands on the railing. “The president has been pushing construction of a new airport in the West Bank and a shipping port in Gaza. I’m told he’s been riding the Israelis really hard. They’ve said that without a properly negotiated settlement and monitoring forces in place, and without the dismantling of Hamas, al Humat, Islamic Jihad, and Islamic State, the airport and shipping port would be significant threats to Israel’s survival. Friends of mine in the military and intelligence community agree. That’s what was at stake. That’s why we did what we did. That’s why we defied the White House.”
They absorbed that for a moment.
“Why do you think we had to defy the president in the first place?” Vail asked.
Knox stared off into the distance. His jaw tightened. “Our work is done here. Thank you both again for a job well done.”
As he walked off, Uzi gestured at the blood spatter on her clothes. “Tough time?”
Vail pulled the Tanto from its sheath. “Your gift saved my life tonight.”
“You know,” he said, “that knife is taking on legendary proportions: first it saved my life. And now yours. It’s got its own built-in mojo.”
“Should we do a Game of Thrones thing?”
Uzi tilted his head. “A what?”
“Game of Thrones. The TV show. HBO.”
Uzi shrugged. “Don’t watch much TV.”
“Robby and Jonathan got me into it. A medieval soap opera. The knights name their swords. What do you say we name this knife, ‘Tango slayer’?”
Uzi chuckled. “Hey, it’s yours now. Name it whatever you like.”
“I’ll have to think on it.”
After a moment, he said, “How about Tzedek?”
“Tzedek?”
“It’s a Hebrew word. For justice.”
Vail looked at the blade, spit on it, and wiped the dried blood from its surface with her blouse. “Tzedek. Justice. I like it.” She angled it forward, catching the glow of a nearby spotlight against its black matte finish. “You familiar with the Bible?”
He cocked his head to the left. “I think I’ve heard of it.”
“There’s a verse … ‘Never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God.’”
Uzi shrugged. “I think a little revenge is okay sometimes. As long as it’s done with well reasoned moral intentions. To right a wrong. A tooth for a tooth.”
I’ve definitely had those feelings. “One of the psalms says, ‘Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right.’”
Uzi leaned back. “I never took you for a religious person. I learn something new about you every day, Karen. You’re a very complex individual, you know that?”
“Complex? Yeah. Religious? Not so much. The psalm is just something my mother used to tell me when I was a kid. I wrote it on an index card and had it above my computer screen in my office. I thought it expressed what I do as a federal agent. We maintain justice, always striving to do what’s right.”
Uzi examined her face a moment. “You said you had it over your desk. Past tense.”
Vail turned away. “After Robby disappeared … I—” She shook her head. “I did what I had to do. But I didn’t do what was right, I didn’t maintain justice. I stepped over the line.”
“Sometimes things aren’t black and white.” The voice came from a few feet behind them: DeSantos. “You did what was right for the one you loved. It didn’t meet the standards of the laws we strive to uphold. But if you — if we—hadn’t done what we did, a lot of people would’ve died. Good people. People who’ve done a lot of good things for a lot of other people since then.”
Vail played with some loose dirt by her left shoe. “You talking about back then, or this op? I did things tonight that—”
“Your moral compass is what matters, Karen. What’s in your heart. You always mean well. You always try to do the right thing. Sometimes it takes a while to know what the right thing is — or was.”
Vail smiled inwardly. DeSantos’s comment was similar to something she had once told Robby. She looked out over the model of Jerusalem and tried to picture herself back thousands of years, standing where she was at this very moment … learning from the wise rabbis who roamed the streets, doling out wisdom and creating law for a population who was only beginning to learn how to conduct themselves, how to live for the benefit of the community. How to put their trust in a higher being. How to believe.
It was the birth of a religion that would spawn other religions, changing the world in ways no one could have ever predicted. Good, bad, indifferent — organized religion had its positives and negatives. But its effect on civilization was palpable.
Vail was not sure if she believed in God or some other entity that governed the souls on earth. In many cases she thought she did not — she had looked into the minds of countless killers and seen evil. No God would dare create that. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Bundy, Chikatilo, Gacy, Dahmer. Yet these scourges of humanity existed. She was sure religious sages had an explanation, but at the moment it was unimportant.