The Deadly Scrolls, page 16
“My building’s just around the corner.”
Maya headed down a rutted two-lane street with no sidewalks. She turned at the end of the road and was immediately lost from view.
Hillel scurried after her. There were only a few streetlights in the development, most of them missing bulbs or flickering with weak light. The trailers and low apartment buildings were mostly dark. Near the end of the street, the last embers of a trashcan fire sparked and sputtered. A stray yellow dog loped behind Hillel, its ribs outlined against its mangy fur. Nearby, a few other dogs picked through the scraps of a meal, snapping at each other over the bones. The yellow dog ran over to join them, provoking a chorus of howls and yips.
When Hillel turned the corner, he found himself facing a four-story apartment house constructed of poor-quality Jerusalem stone. The exterior surface had eroded in places to reveal the concrete shell and I-beams underneath. The building was square, consisting of sixteen identical block units. The windows, too, were square, divided into two panes bisected by a vertical frame. There was nothing architecturally noteworthy about the construction. It was simple, cheap, and utterly without character.
Hillel caught sight of Maya bent down in a half-crouch under a bare yellow bulb near the front entrance to her building. Her head swiveled nervously from side to side. In her hand, she held a snub-nosed handgun. It too swung slowly back and forth in a half-arc.
She beckoned him toward her, then tugged on his sleeve to make him crouch down beside her.
“I think we’ve been followed.”
With her free hand, she pointed to one corner of her building, its stone edge blurred by dark shadows.
“Dark cap, dark clothes. Tall and thin. That’s all I could make out. He’s no longer there.”
She paused, inhaled sharply, then spit out a breath.
“I could swear I heard a camera click. I think I also saw him near the Hebron intersection, but I can’t be sure.”
“Should we call the police?” Hillel laughed uneasily. “Oops, I forgot. You are the police.”
Maya’s face was a stony mask. She stood up and shook out her legs.
“Whoever he is,” she said, “he’s long gone.”
She forced herself to put the stalker out of mind. Probably some snoop Rafi hired to document her questionable morals and negligent parenting. No sense worrying about it now. She had a different agenda tonight.
Taking a slow, deep breath, she stepped into the dark doorway of her building. The yellow light of the bare bulb now revealed only the toes of her right sandal.
“Hillel.” Maya’s voice was soft and sensual, lacking its customary edge. “Come here.”
Hillel walked slowly toward the dark entryway. His gait seemed somewhat unsteady, but it could no longer be the whiskey. Maya eyed him keenly, like a stalking cat.
She felt a tingling on the surface of her skin. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her palms were moist. It had been quite a long time since she’d felt this way in the presence of a man. Her body was already far ahead of her brain. Her slender arms reached out. She longed to hold him—in her arms, between her legs. To taste his lips and tongue. To drown in his unfathomable blue eyes.
Maya held out her hand and drew Hillel close. Tangled together, they staggered deeper into the dark hallway, beyond the reach of the yellow bulb. She reached up to cradle his soft, dark curls in her hand. She gently pulled his head toward her until their lips met. They kissed tentatively. Maya placed her hand behind his head and pressed his face into hers. She pushed their lips together until his opened. She thrust her tongue between his lips. He pushed back with his. She ran her tongue against his teeth, sliding over the smooth enamel.
By now, she’d lost all orientation in space and time. No inner voice told her to stop. Nothing cautioned her to think about what she was doing. Her will had been hijacked.
And so had his. Desire now had Hillel completely in thrall. His soft hands glided eagerly from Maya’s hair down to her shoulders. Then, they slid down to her full breasts, which were straining against the light material of her dress.
“Let’s go inside.” Maya’s breath exploded in quick puffs. “My daughter’s with my parents for the night.”
Whether it was the mention of her daughter or her parents or just the sound of her voice after so much silence, something made Hillel pull away. He stepped back into the harsh light of the bare yellow bulb.
“I should be getting back,” he said. He turned his face away. “It’s late.”
Maya remained in the shadows. Her breath slowed, then became inaudible.
“If that’s what you want.”
Her voice revealed nothing.
For an incalculable period of time, neither spoke. A dog barked. An ambulance or police siren wailed in the distance. Maya listened to her breathing, steady and calm.
“I’ll call a cab for you,” she said. “Might be a long wait this time of night.”
And then she was gone.
She didn’t bother to press down the timer in the first-floor hallway to illuminate the dark stairwell. She hurried up to the fourth floor in the darkness, her sandals slapping the stone stairs. When she got to her landing, she fumbled for her key. She unlocked the door, pushed it open, and slammed it shut behind her. Then, she leaned back against the wall, her chest heaving.
In her bones and muscles and nerves, she felt the fatigue of the long walk. It was exacerbated by the tension she’d been carrying for the past few days. Apprehensiveness about the case. Fear of failure and humiliation. And on top of this, her anxiety about what was going to happen with Hillel. She felt as if she’d been transported to some giant planet, its unbearable gravity weighing her down. Her shoulders sagged. She slumped to the hard, stone floor.
She retrieved her mobile phone from her purse and called the local taxi service. The dispatcher told her he couldn’t guarantee a pick-up time this late at night. She opened the bedroom window and leaned out.
“They said ten minutes, which probably means a half hour. But they’re dependable. I use them all the time.” She paused and swallowed. Her throat was raw. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not come down to wait with you. I’m exhausted.”
Hillel waved up at her but said nothing.
She closed the window without saying goodnight. There was a faint squeak and thud as she pulled the metal frame tight and bolted it.
45
THE NEXT MORNING, MAYA ARRIVED at Service Headquarters shortly after 8:00 a.m., her auburn curls still kinked and damp from the shower. Several of her colleagues glanced down at their watches or phones, eyebrows raised. A few clapped or gave her a thumbs up. She ignored them.
As soon as she sat down at her desk, her cell phone chimed.
“About last night….”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Hillel. I’m busy. I have an investigation to run.”
She wanted to add: “Without you!” But she didn’t. She had promised herself last night that she was through with him—both as a consultant and a would-be lover. But when the phone rang, she found herself hoping it was him calling to apologize. Would she never learn?
He took her silence as encouragement.
“I can understand why you’re upset. We need to talk.”
“What’s there to talk about? You’ve made your feelings quite clear.”
“That’s just it! I haven’t!” His voice was loud, almost a whine. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an idiot when it comes to women. I spend too much time in my head. And I don’t have much practice.”
“Nice speech, professor.” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice but didn’t try hard enough.
Come on. Break it off. Now. But then she pictured his gentle hands. His intense, cornflower-blue eyes. And her resolve faltered.
“Look, Hillel. The truth is that we have nothing in common.”
“Opposites attract. Excuse the cliché.”
She needed to get mad at him, override her own neediness. How did Roni put it? Man up! So she pushed harder, hoping to provoke him.
“You’ve got too much damn luggage!”
“I think you mean ‘baggage.’” She heard him chuckling. Despite herself, she blushed. At least over the phone he couldn’t see the roses coloring her cheeks.
“You know what I mean. I appreciate all the help you’ve given me up to now. I’ll take it from here.”
“I think you could still use my help.”
She finally felt the gorge rising in her throat. Her fingers clenched around the phone. She needed to end it now—before it became too hard.
She pressed the red hang-up icon. Then, she tossed the cell phone into her large shoulder bag. Her held breath whooshed out of her like a deflating balloon.
For the next few minutes, she sat at her desk, drumming the gray metal surface with her fingers. Her unfocused eyes stared at the drawn mini-blinds covering the glass door. Then, her hand floated up to her chin. Her forefinger stroked the roughened skin. Her fingertip encountered a stiff bristle, and she began pulling at it with her clipped fingernails, trying to pluck it out. Her therapist called it self-soothing. Only it didn’t always work. It certainly didn’t now.
She forced her hand away from her chin. Then, she picked up the black desk phone and called Ziggy Dweck.
46
“WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM the hotel’s phone logs?”
“You were right,” Ziggy said. “Turns out the Lowenthals”…mumbling…“a lot more than just eating dinner and watching”…mumbling…“night. You’ll never guess”…mumbling…“were up to!”
No doubt Ziggy’s mouth was full of food. Her fellow agent was forever noshing, mostly on his mother’s sticky Syrian pastries. She heard him swallow hard, gulp water from a plastic bottle, then twist the cap back on.
“Just spit it out, Ziggy! I don’t have all day.”
“The old professor was on a phone sex hotline. For three hours!”
Maya gasped. That pretentious old peacock!
“And his son, Adam?”
Ziggy bit down on something crunchy. His chewing was like wax paper crackling in her ear.
“Even more unbelievable. One of our IT guys hacked into his computer. Turns out Junior spent all night sockpuppeting. Posing as one of his father’s arch-rivals, Professor Geoffrey Cox.”
“Sending bogus emails.”
“B’diyuk. The phony emails made it look like Cox was confessing to having committed scholarly fraud.”
There was a pause. Maya heard Ziggy guzzling water, then fussing with a paper bag.
“So, both Lowenthals were ‘otherwise engaged’ when Boaz Goldmayer was breathing his last?”
Maya didn’t tell Ziggy that she’d already eliminated the senior Lowenthal. This new information only deepened her scorn for the old man. But now, she had to exclude the son as well. No way Adam could have poisoned Goldmayer and stolen his data while he was busy sending out sock puppets on his laptop. Even a mad genius wasn’t that clever. That left only Habib Salameh as a credible suspect.
But something didn’t make sense. Why had the antiquities dealer felt compelled to kill the American professor? All he had needed from Goldmayer was the location of the duplicate scroll so that he could track down the Temple treasures. Adding murder to the crime of theft significantly upped the risk for him. And Habib Salameh was nothing if not cautious. Some might even say paranoid. He would have resorted to murder only if he felt he had no choice.
What was she missing?
47
MAYA STARED VACANTLY AT HER office’s mottled green walls. She recalled the disturbing conversation she’d had with Tim Hargreaves at the LTM Center. About blood moons as apocalyptic omens. Something about this information still gnawed at her.
And the next blood moon was going to occur tomorrow night.
Bending over her keyboard, she logged into her secure account.
Eagerly, she typed in the keywords, “blood moon.” Clicking through various scientific sites, she learned that during certain lunar eclipses, the Earth’s moon turns blood-red, due to a light effect called Rayleigh scattering. It had something to do with shortened wave lengths and air pollution.
But the Christian websites she clicked on offered a very different spin on this common astronomical phenomenon. According to them, blood moons were messianic signs. All the sites quoted the same two verses from the Bible:
From the Book of Joel 2:31: “And the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord.”
And from the New Testament, the Book of Revelation 6:12: “I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair. The whole moon turned blood red.”
She probed deeper. It turned out that an American televangelist from Texas, John Hagee, had first coined the term, “blood moon,” to suggest its prophetic significance. “The blood moon is a warning sign to humankind that darkness will overcome the Earth; the Lord will come during these dark times.” According to Hagee, there was a special connection between blood moons and Israel. Many significant events in Jewish history had coincided with blood moons, including the fall of the Babylonian Empire and the Spanish Inquisition in 1492.
Maya shook her head and sighed. Why did so many Israelis applaud the pro-Zionism of Christian evangelicals? Didn’t they realize how crazy these people were? Didn’t they understand that these Christians only supported Israel because they needed the Jews to come home to Zion and convert in order to pave the way for the second coming of Christ? She chuckled to herself. Religion certainly made strange bedfellows!
Maya also learned more about what a Tetrad was. The term referred to a sequence of four blood moons, that is, lunar eclipses, occurring close together, with six full moons in between. Such occurrences were very rare. During the past two thousand years, Tetrads had only happened sixty-two times.
But even rarer were the Tetrads that coincided with Jewish holidays. Such sequences had only occurred eight times in twenty-one centuries. There had been a Tetrad during Israel’s War of Independence and another coinciding with the Six-Day War. Their infrequency made these particular Tetrads especially significant to those eagerly awaiting the End Times.
The most recent Jewish Festival Tetrad had occurred in 2014–15. During both these years, there had been total lunar eclipses on Passover and Sukkot. Hagee and another American minister, Mark Blitz, announced that the world would end after the fourth blood moon in fall 2015. Following that final eclipse, the Middle East would be wholly transformed. Jews and Arabs would sign a peace treaty, agreeing to share control of the Temple Mount. Jews would then erect the Third Temple on the Mount, without destroying the two Arab shrines currently standing there. And then the Antichrist would come, setting off the Abomination of Desolation, which would result in a second Jewish Holocaust, this time in Israel. But before this catastrophe happened, Christians would rush to the aid of the Jews, persuading them to embrace Jesus and be saved.
Of course, the world had not come to an end in the fall of 2015. But the Christian prognosticators weren’t discouraged. There was always the next Tetrad, due to occur in 2032–33.
Maya stood up from her chair and threw back her shoulders. She felt a satisfying pop as her bones and muscles realigned themselves. How could Habib Salameh get involved in this nonsense? He was a Muslim, even if a lapsed one. Muslims didn’t go in for such outlandish ideas, did they? They were carrying out scientific astronomy when Christians were still burning witches in Europe. But he’d be happy to make a profit from anyone’s beliefs, no matter how wild. Religious chicanery was fungible.
She logged into the agency’s archives, hunting for any Christian groups in Jerusalem that had any known connections to “blood moons” or “Tetrads.” The keyword search identified several such groups, including the “New Children of Light,” Tim Hargreaves’ new church. Their website announced that there would be an event marking the blood moon tomorrow night on the Tayelet. It would definitely be worth checking out.
On a hunch, she pulled up her old case file on the LTM Center investigation from several months ago. That case continued to niggle at her, despite Roni’s repeated warnings to let it go. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for. Rapidly, she skimmed through her old notes. One name popped out. Pinkas Mashiak. She wasn’t sure why it flagged her attention. She must have questioned him during the course of her investigation, but she couldn’t put a face to the name.
She entered the name in the Service database. The search turned up nothing. She started combing through online newspapers, websites, and blogs. Bit by bit, a profile of Pinkas Mashiak began to emerge.
He had been born Tyrell Quimby in Davis Creek, West Virginia. Known to his family and friends as Troy. Raised by his mother and grandparents on their family farm. Dropped out of high school at sixteen. Several years later, he’d founded the Good News Gospel Church in nearby Yawkey, West Virginia. A year ago, he had immigrated to Israel and legally changed his name to Pinkas Mashiak. The New Children of Light, the name he’d chosen for his new church in Jerusalem, was inspired by the ancient Qumran community, who’d composed the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mashiak’s was a small congregation, claiming fewer than two hundred members. They held Sunday services in a rented room inside a large evangelical church in East Jerusalem.
