males prayed; Nevaeh couldn’t get into it, not this time. Ben intoned the same request for God to accept their work she had heard how many times? She’d lost count long ago. His voice was deep and measured, every word perfectly formed.
“… guide our labor, for we are your obedient children…”
Oh please, she thought, then squeezed her eyes shut. I mean, please… do guide us back into your arms at long last. At long, long last. After so many years, it was hard to maintain confidence in their missions. But if she stopped believing, their torment would never end, and just the thought of that sent spiders skittering through her stomach. She felt as though she’d been hanging from a ledge by her fingers forever. The abyss of nothingness below her kept her fighting for leverage, spurring her to struggle and strain. But how long before her muscles simply could not take anymore?
Every mission, every killing was her cry for help, for forgiveness — so many cries that her soul was bleeding and raw. Still, every cry had apparently fallen on deaf ears.
She realized Ben had stopped talking, and opened her eyes. He was staring at her, his intense gaze piercing holes into her. Phin and Jordan were watching as well.
“Amen,” she said.
Elias pulled in a loud, sharp breath and sat straight up. He pushed himself back to rest against the van’s rear doors, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette and lighter. A shaking hand put the cigarette to his lips, and he lit up. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and blew out a stream of smoke. He shook his head, then rubbed his chest, finally ripping the suit open from neck to navel. Blood caked his chest hair into red paisleys. Over his heart, a dime-sized dimple showed mostly scar tissue. At its center was a pinprick hole from which a thin rivulet of blood snaked down his chest.
Nevaeh remembered the hole that been there thirty minutes before, large enough to stick her finger in and touch his heart. Couldn’t do that now, and by morning it would look like nothing more than a vaccination scar.
Elias looked at each of his compatriots in turn, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and said, “Wow. That was a trip.”
5
The blazing Egyptian sun baked Jagger Baird’s face, and he tipped his head to let the brim of his boonie hat shade his eyes: his sunglasses were about as effective as tissue in a rainstorm. A gust of wind tossed sand at him, and he turned his back until it passed.
Standing outside the southeast wall of St. Catherine’s monastery, he surveyed the tight valley stretching out before him. The hard ground dipped and rose, formed grooves and cracks, ravines and sharp ledges, as though it had been hacked into existence. Sand and loose rock had come down off the mountains and settled into a tiger- stripe pattern of treacherous terrain on top of bedrock-all of it sun-bleached to the color of old bones. The term that came to mind was godforsaken, which flew in the face of everything the area stood for. The mountain looming to his right, behind the monastery, was Jabel Musa-Moses’s Mountain. Most of the world believed it to be the biblical Mt. Sinai, where God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and gave him the Ten Commandments.
On a pilgrimage here in the fourth century, Helena, mother of Constantine, claimed she had found the actual burning bush and built a small church around it. Two hundred years later, in 527, Emperor Justinian I ordered the construction of a protective wall around the church. The result became the monastery, no larger than a city block- with walls sixty feet high and nine feet thick. For 1500 years, the walls and monks inside had weathered crusaders and invaders, political and religious turbulence, famine and fires.
The latest onslaught was tourists, flocking to touch the bush, marvel at the monastery’s ancient structures, and climb the mountain to the spot where Moses received the Decalogue. Probably why the mountains as they rose gradually took on a reddish hue, Jagger thought: they were irritated by the bumbling trespassers, the way too much alcohol inflames a drunkard’s nose.
His gaze moved from the mountain to the cloudless sky-denim blue at the northern horizon, brightening to brushed aluminum overhead-then down to the archaeological excavation that had brought him here as head of security. It consisted primarily of two Olympic-pool-sized rectangles, each stepping down to a depth of about twenty feet. They were positioned perpendicular to the slope rising from the valley floor to the base of Mt. Sinai. The hole-or unit — closest to the mountain was higher up the slope and had been dubbed Annabelle. The lower hole was Bertha. Ollie-Dr. Oliver Hoffmann, the lead archaeologist-had explained that their official designations were 55E60 and 48E122, respectively. These names indicated their positions in relation to a site datum, a point from which all dig activity was measured. On site, the lead arc was expected to christen them with easier monikers.
“So I did,” he’d said with a grin badly in need of dental assistance.
“Meaning A and B?” Jagger had asked.
“Meaning two lovely ladies of my youth who left holes in my heart. Now I dig holes in their honor.”
They’d been at a tavern in the nearby town of St. Catherine’s, and Ollie had raised his glass to take a swig. The beer was Stella, an Egyptian concoction that many connoisseurs considered the best in the world. Judging by Ollie’s consumption of it, he didn’t disagree.
Downhill from the holes was a line of five beige tents, their aprons now fluttering in the breeze. Ollie used one as an office; the others provided storage space and shelter from the sun, a place to rest.
Ten yards below the tents, past a split-rail fence, ran the trail that led from the monastery to the two routes up Mt. Sinai-Siket El Basha, a gradually ascending, winding path; and Siket Sayidna Musa, a much steeper ascent of 3,800 steps chiseled into the mountain’s granite by monks.
Jagger couldn’t imagine the dedication required to accomplish that, kneeling on the harsh slope, pounding on hard stone in sweltering heat day after day for decades. But then, any faith that inspired such dedication was beyond him. He was fully aware of his sour disposition, and the reason for it: since a particular night fourteen months ago, his life had mirrored a Reader’s Digest survival story gone wrong. His wife, Beth, had written a few of them; he knew the drill: an average person is thrust into the eye of a hurricane named Disaster and somehow finds the strength to overcome, even triumph. Take out overcome and triumph, and you got Jagger’s story. He was still looking for his happy ending.
If Beth were plotting a piece on him, it’d look something like this: Ivy Leaguer meets girl of his dreams. Whirlwind courtship. Wedding bells. Baby! Sheepskin. Commissioned as 2Lt, U.S. Army… Rangers… CID. Starts personal protection company with college/army BFF. Family/ career bliss. Car crash… other driver drunk! BFF + BFF’s family dies. Arm amputated. Prosthesis. Depression. Survivor’s guilt. Furious at God.
Jagger crouched and picked up a stone. His boots had burnished a stable flat spot on the rocky slope. It was his favorite observation point, from which he could see the entire excavation with the monastery’s wall protecting his back. Rolling the stone in his palm, he watched two university students carry buckets of dirt out of Bertha. They dumped them into a screen-bottomed box on wooden legs, then began shaking the box to sift for treasures. As fascinating as he considered the idea of finding traces of long-lost people, he had quickly realized it was grueling and boring work, something he could never do. He’d take a gun over a trowel any day.
Security-and-protection: that interested him, and through stints as an Army Ranger, a military investigator, and then a personal protection specialist-aka an executive bodyguard-he’d discovered a knack for it. Whether protecting a dignitary or an archaeological dig, he took his responsibilities seriously. More seriously, it seemed, than most archaeologists were accustomed to. When he’d arrived, the four guards already on site might have been recruited from a Cairo shopping mall. They’d worn no uniforms, except for what Jagger thought of as high school grunge, and, incredibly, spent most of their time playing cards on the other side of the monastery, where the gardens provided a measure of shade but no way to do their jobs.
It bugged him that here in Egypt the word gun was merely a metaphor for his profession. Firearms were stringently regulated, and Ollie had told him to anticipate at least a year for the government to approve his application, if it was approved at all. Used to be, Jagger wouldn’t go a week without firing a weapon on a range. Now it’d been four months since he’d last felt the weight of a gun in his hand or smelled the clean fragrance of gun oil. He felt naked without firepower. He touched the hilt of a collapsible baton in a quick-release holster hanging at his hip where a pistol should have been. For crying out loud.
He tossed the stone, watched it clatter over larger rocks and settle among a thousand like it, and he changed
