What to say? He had no time to ease into this, so he might as well throw it in her face and see how she reacts.
He flashed his Shin Bet ID and kept his voice low. “You’re wanted for questioning in regard to the theft of an archeological treasure that belongs to the Israeli government.”
She reacted with a dumbfounded expression.
“What? Are you mad? Just what sort of treasure am I supposed to have stolen?”
“You know exactly what it is, Sister. It doesn’t belong to you. Please give it back.”
“Does it belong to you?”
The question took Kesev by surprise. And she was staring at him, her narrowed eyes boring into his, as if seeing something there.
“No...no...it belongs to—”
“Who are you?” she said.
“I told you. Kesev, with—”
“No. That’s not true.” Her eyes widened now, as if she were suddenly afraid of him. “You’re not who you say you are. You’re someone else. Who are you—really?”
Now it was Kesev’s turn to be dumbfounded. How did she know? How could she know?
Reflexively he backed away from her. Who was this woman?
“Excuse me, Sister,” said another voice. “Is this man bothering you?”
Kesev looked up to see a tall priest rising from an aisle seat a few rows back, glaring down at him as he approached.
“The poor man seems deranged,” Sister Carolyn said.
The priest reached above the nun’s seat and pressed the call button for the stewardess. “I’ll have him removed.”
Kesev backed away. “Sorry. My mistake.”
The last thing he wanted was a scene. He had no official capacity here and no logical reason he could give his superiors for pulling this woman off the plane.
Besides, he was looking for a man and a woman, not a nun. Especially not that nun. Something about her, something ethereal...the way she’d looked at him...looked through him. She’d looked at him and she knew. She knew!
He staggered forward through a cloud of confusion. What was happening? Everything had been fine until that damn SCUD had crashed near the Resting Place. Since then it had been one thing after another, chipping at the foundations of his carefully reconstructed life, until today’s cataclysm.
Kuttner looked at him questioningly as he reached the front of the cabin.
“Not her,” Kesev said. “But I want to check the cargo hold.”
The head stewardess groaned and Kuttner said, “I don’t know about that.”
“It will only take a minute or two. The object in question is at least a meter and a half in length. It can’t be in a suitcase. I just want to check out the larger parcels.”
Kuttner shrugged resignedly. “All right. But let’s get to it.”
‡
Dan quietly slipped into 12A. His boarding pass had him in 15D—they’d decided it was best not to sit together—but Carrie had this half of row 12 to herself so he joined her. But not too close.
When no none was looking he reached across the empty seat and grabbed her hand. It was cold, sweaty, trembling.
“You were great,” he whispered.
She’d been more than great, she’d been wonderful. When he’d seen that little bearded rooster of a Shin Bet man stalk down the aisle, he’d prayed for strength in the imminent confrontation. But he’d stopped at Carrie’s seat, not Dan’s. And then Dan had cursed himself for not realizing that their pursuer would be looking for someone named Ferris. But Carrie had stood up to that Shin Bet man, kept her cool, and faced him down. Dan had only stepped in to add the coup de grace.
“I don’t feel great. I feel sick.”
“What did you say to him at the end?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he hadn’t seemed too sure of himself in the first place, but—”
Carrie’s smile was wan but real. “We can thank your idea of getting into uniform for that.”
“Sure, but you said something and all the color went out of him.”
“I asked him who he really was. As he was speaking to me I had the strangest feeling about him, that he was an impostor—or maybe that isn’t the right word. I think he’s truly from their domestic intelligence, whatever it’s called, but he’s also someone else. And he’s hiding that someone else.”
“Whatever it is, I’d say you struck a nerve.”
“I didn’t really have a choice. I just knew right then that I was very afraid of the person he was hiding.”
“So am I, though probably not for the same reason. Damn, I wish we’d get moving. What’s the hold up?”
Dan looked past Carrie through the window at the lights of the airport, and wondered what Mr. Kesev was up to now. He wouldn’t feel safe until they were in the air and over the Mediterranean.
“And yet,” Carrie said softly, “there’s something terribly sad about him. He said something that shocked me.”
“What?”
“He said ‘please.’ He said, ‘Please give it back.’ Isn’t that strange?”
‡
Kesev stood at one of the panoramic windows in the main terminal and watched the plane roar into the sky toward London.
Nothing.
He’d found nothing in the cargo hold or baggage compartment large enough to contain the Mother.
That gave him hope, at least, that the Mother was still in Israel. And if she was still here, he could find her.
But where was she? Where?
He trembled at the thought of what might happen if she were not safely returned to the Resting Place.
FOURTEEN
The Greenbriar—off Crete
Second mate Dennis Maguire was rounding the port side of the superstructure amidships when he saw her.
At least it seemed to be a her. He couldn’t be sure in the downpour. The figure stood a good fifty feet away in the center of the aft hold’s hatch, wrapped head to toe in some sort of blanket, completely unmindful of the driving rain as she stared aftward. He couldn’t make out any features in the dimness, but something in his gut knew he was looking at a she.
They’d run into the squall shortly after dark the first night out of Haifa. Maguire was running a topside check to make double sure everything was secure. A sturdy little tramp, the Greenbriar was. With a 200-foot keel and thirty feet abeam, she could haul good cargo in her two holds, and haul it fast. But any storm, even lightweight Mediterranean squalls like this one, could be trouble if everything wasn’t secured the way it was supposed to be. And Captain Liam could be hell on wheels if something went wrong because of carelessness.
So Maguire had learned: Do it right the first time, then double check to make sure you did what you thought you did.
And after he wound up this little tour of the deck, he could retire to his cabin and work on his bottle of Jameson’s.
I’m glad I haven’t touched that bottle yet, he thought.
Because right now he’d be blaming the whiskey for what he was seeing.
A woman? How the hell had a woman got aboard? And why would any woman want to be aboard?
She stood facing aft, like some green-gilled landlubber staring homeward.
“Hello?” he said, approaching the hatch.
She turned toward him but the glow from the lights in the superstructure weren’t strong enough to light her features through the rain. And then he noticed something: the blanket or cloak or robe or whatever she was wrapped up in wasn’t moving or even fluttering in the wind. In fact, it didn’t even look wet.
He blinked and turned his head as a particularly nasty gust stung his face with needle-sharp droplets, and when he looked again, she was gone.