The Lost Codex (OPSIG Team Black Series Book 3) Read online

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  The Lost Codex

  An OPSIG Team Black Novel

  Alan Jacobson

  For Florence Jacobson

  My mother’s life changed dramatically the moment her father succumbed to a fatal heart attack at the dinner table. Following that traumatic event, she took on the challenge of raising her younger brother while my grandmother went to work in Manhattan. A dozen years later, during my childhood, whenever there was an issue in our Queens neighborhood, be it a broken streetlight or a problem at our local elementary school, people knew they could rely on my mother to raise hell—and get the problem taken care of. She fought when others yielded. She persisted when others acquiesced. Most importantly, my mother taught me perseverance, a vital trait without which I never would’ve been able to overcome the obstacles I’ve encountered in life. While each of my novels could have been dedicated to my mother, my milestone tenth book is for her.

  “At the center of this story is not a diamond, a painting, or a suitcase full of bills, but a book. Some would say it is the book: the authoritative copy of a text whose position at the root of more than one civilization has given it bearing on the lives of billions of people, even if they have never read it.”

  —MATTI FRIEDMAN, The Aleppo Codex

  “Just sitting down five minutes drinking a cup of tea with mujahedeen is better than anything I’ve ever experienced in my whole life … I lived in America! I know how it is. You have all the fancy amusement parks, and the restaurants, and the food, and all this crap and the cars and you think you’re happy. You’re not happy, you’re never happy. I was never happy. I was always sad and depressed. Life sucked … All you do is work 40, 50, 60 hours a week. [Now] I see paradise and I can smell paradise.”

  —MONER MOHAMMED ABU-SALHA

  American al Qaeda suicide bomber

  seconds before blowing himself up

  “The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, is sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie told well is immortal.”

  —MARK TWAIN

  PROLOGUE

  Wadi Qumran

  One mile Northwest of the Dead Sea

  The West Bank, Jordan

  August 6, 1953

  Eylad Uziel walked carefully over the rough terrain of the Qumran caves. This was Bedouin territory in land governed by Jordan, but he was an Israeli—an unusual if not suicidal proposition. Then again, no one knew his true identity or nationality. Officially, he was the primary translator on the Catholic archaeological team led by Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest. Their sprawling, multiyear project was like no other in history: excavating the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Uziel, a soldier during Israel’s war of independence and a scholar before that, had been recruited into Mossad, the fledgling security service designed to gather information regarding threats to the state. Given Israel’s location, pinned in by hostile countries determined to wipe it off the face of the earth, Mossad’s charge was a vital asset during a time of unrest.

  But Uziel’s assignment was extraordinary. In spring 1947 a Bedouin shepherd had stumbled onto a cave containing ancient scrolls on animal parchment that turned out to be a handwritten copy of the Old Testament, penned thousands of years ago under the threat of the advancing Romans and their conquering marauders. Uziel’s job was to blend in with the archaeologists working at the site, take stock of what was discovered, and perform a cursory accounting of its significance. Six years earlier, when the first cave had been discovered, the Bedouins who found the scrolls sold them to private antiquities dealers.

  Israel, like the West Bank, was still under British rule at the time and powerless to stop the plundering of what its leaders felt was its legacy: the two-thousand-year-old documents were the earliest recorded portions of the Hebrew Bible ever discovered, copied by an ancient Jewish sect whose members likely believed that they were preparing an archive to preserve their religious and cultural traditions in the event the Romans sacked Jerusalem.

  The scrolls belonged in a museum, not on the black market.

  Uziel’s scholarly work, leading digs and excavating Israel’s hidden history in stone fragments, leather parchments, long-buried buildings, coins, and religious artifacts, also entailed providing analysis to the government and its burgeoning national museum, so that the ancient Jewish civilization that populated the Judean land over the centuries could be properly recorded, studied, and brought into historical perspective.

  On November 29, 1947—the day of the historic United Nations vote in Queens, New York, that partitioned Palestine and led to the establishment of the state of Israel five months later—Uziel had purchased three scrolls from a Jordanian antiquities dealer.

  Examining the manuscripts left him thirsty to see what other parchments had been holed away in that cave—and the adjacent caves that had been excavated in the subsequent years. Not far away sat the ruins of a complex that housed the Essenes, the Jewish sect whose community members were thought to be the scrolls’ primary scribes.

  Despite Uziel’s efforts, and those of other Mossad and government agents, many of the ancient scrolls were still privately held—most notably, by a Palestinian family who had purchased them for a pittance from the Bedouin, who did not know the significance of what they had stumbled upon.

  The Vatican had stepped in and taken custody of the rest, and despite requests from numerous Catholic and Jewish scholars, kept them under lock and key, sequestered for some as yet unstated reason.

  Uziel made a case to the young Israeli government and national museum that they needed a set of eyes at the dig, overseeing any new discoveries.

  Bolstering Uziel’s argument, intelligence analysts had heard rumors that Roland de Vaux’s deputy, Alberi Michel, was a bigoted, vindictive sort who was a fascist sympathizer and displayed flashes of anti-Semitism. Although Mossad could not verify such allegations, Uziel’s mission was approved and conceived in a way that the Israeli government could have eyes on the ground, ensuring that whatever remained of its cultural and historical treasures were not defaced, destroyed, stolen, or sold on the black market.

  Uziel wore a straw hat with a wide brim and a white linen shirt, his skin brown from months in the intense sun. Standing on a precipice and looking out at the Qumran landscape, he drew a cotton rag across his brow. There was no breeze and the air was desert dry, despite the proximity of the Dead Sea, which sat off to his left, in plain view on this clear day. Directly in front of him were the undulating burnt sienna and cinnamon colored rocky outcroppings of the hills that sported small openings to the caves which had served as hiding areas for the clay jars that bore the scrolls.

  A loud whistle echoed across the divide a few meters away, in the vicinity of Cave 11. Uziel made his way over, navigating the rough terrain and using rope ladders stretched across the stony surfaces.

  “I’ve got something!” one of the men said in French. “Another scroll, a big one.”

  Uziel quickened his pace. Finds of any magnitude were now few and far between, and witnessing the moment of its unveiling was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

  Uziel climbed the rope ladder, slipping twice and nearly taking a header when his toe missed the rung and instead hit a protrusion in the rock face. “What do you got?” he asked in Arabic.

  “Look, look!” Michel said. He tossed his whisker brush aside and squared his body in front of the excavated find.
“Give me a hand.”

  There were now three men in the mouth of the cave behind Uziel. He knelt beside Michel and helped him lift the clay vessel from the loosened dirt.

  “How do you know there’s a scroll in here?”

  “There’s always a scroll in these pots.”

  Uziel gave him a look.

  “And I peeked.”

  Uziel laughed—more giddy with excitement than from the comment.

  The two men carried the container carefully, the other workers standing aside as if in reverence of its contents. Twenty minutes later, they had the receptacle open and the scroll sitting on a work table that was shielded from the elements.

  They put on clean work gloves, then Michel glanced at Uziel. “It’s big, like I told you.”

  “I can see that.”

  They held their breath as they began to slowly unroll it. After exposing three feet, they paused and Uziel hunched over the parchment. This was why he was here: to read, and translate, the Hebrew or Aramaic.

  “Remarkably well preserved,” Uziel said. His eyes moved from right to left, line to line, when Michel nudged his left shoulder.

  “What is it?” Michel asked. “What’s it say?”

  Uziel kept reading. “This is … it’s different.”

  “Different? How so?”

  He carefully unrolled another foot and continued moving across the document. “Extraordinary.” He stopped and looked up. “Clear the table, give me more to read.”

  “Tell me,” Michel said, staring at the black ink block letters. “What does it say?”

  Uziel soldiered on, his lips moving as he spoke the Hebrew aloud. Ten minutes later, having reached the end, he reached for the chair behind him and sat down heavily.

  “I swear it,” Michel said. “By the hand of Christ, I will strike you with my walking stick if you don’t tell me what it says.”

  “Christ is an interesting choice of words.” He made eye contact and his elation turned to concern. “This could change history, my friend.”

  PART 1

  “Our military and intelligence personnel go face to face with the world’s most dangerous men every day. They have risked their lives to capture some of the most brutal terrorists on earth and they have worked day and night to find out what the terrorists know so we can stop new attacks. America owes our brave men and women some things in return; we owe them thanks for saving lives and keeping America safe …”

  —PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, SEPTEMBER 6, 2006

  “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions to be destroyed.”

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  1

  14th Street NW

  Washington, DC

  Present day

  The waitress set the glass of Board Meeting brown ale on the table in front of FBI profiler Karen Vail. Vail took a long sip and said, “Notes of dark chocolate and coffee. I’ve definitely developed a taste for this. It’s very … stimulating.” She winked at her fiancé, DEA special agent Roberto Hernandez.

  “You mean like an aphrodisiac?” Robby asked. “Beer?”

  Vail leaned close to him, her lips tickling his ear. “When we get home, after I pull your pants off, I’m going to take your—”

  Two gunshots echoed off the facades of the neighboring buildings. Vail and Robby pulled their pistols in unison and ran toward the exit of the storefront bar.

  “That was nearby,” Vail said as she hit the glass door. So much for a romantic night out.

  “Anything?” Robby asked, swiveling in an arc, eyes scanning the nighttime cityscape.

  The vapor from their now-rapid breathing trailed off like apparitions, carried on the breeze that found its way down the collar of Vail’s sweater. She had left without pulling on her coat, and the chill made her shiver involuntarily.

  A shrill scream off to the right in the vicinity of 14th Street NW sent them sprinting down the block. They turned the corner—and saw a body laid out on the sidewalk, the blood pooled next to it dripping over the edge of the curb.

  “Call it in,” Vail said as she continued on toward the injured man. She pressed two fingers against his carotid and shook her head. “Let’s secure the perimeter, hold the scene for Metro PD.”

  Robby brought the phone to his ear and craned his neck to find the street signs so he could report their location.

  Vail hovered over the body but could not resist the urge to check the identity of the deceased.

  C’mon, Karen, let Metro do their jobs. This isn’t your case. This isn’t your jurisdiction.

  She gently patted the man’s jacket with the back of her hand, then moved on to his jeans. In his front pocket Vail felt a wallet. She forced two fingers against the denim and extracted the smooth black leather bi-fold. Her heart skipped a beat as she splayed it open and saw an FBI shield. Agent Harlon Filloon.

  Whoa. Was he killed because he’s a federal agent? Was he working a case? Or is it just a coincidence?

  “Robby.” Vail held up the credentials so he could see what she had found, then folded them and slid them into her pocket.

  He nodded as he finished the call and then reholstered his phone.

  “Something’s not right.” She rose from her crouch and glanced around, her Glock now tight in her grip, following the direction of her gaze.

  She moved toward the street corner a few yards away and heard feet slapping against asphalt. Fleeing suspect?

  Vail pressed her back against the building’s masonry wall as Robby headed toward her.

  “What’s up?”

  “Footsteps. Running. Could be nothing.”

  Glock out in front, chest high, elbows locked against her ribcage, she swung left, around the corner of the edifice—

  And saw a man sprinting across Irving Street, approaching a row of brick townhouses. “Hey!”

  He turned, their eyes met, and that’s when she saw the handgun glint in the amber glow of the streetlight.

  “FBI, don’t move!”

  He twisted his torso and something flew from his hands as he brought up the pistol. But Vail and Robby fired first.

  One or both of them scored a direct hit—and a concussive blast blew them both back onto their buttocks, glass and shrapnel flying past, and against, them. Vail shook her head, opened her eyes, and looked up into a fog of detritus floating down toward her. She rolled onto all fours, her hearing diminished. Robby—

  She swung her gaze around and saw him on a knee, slowly pushing himself upright. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” He staggered toward her, slipping on shards of glass littering the asphalt.

  Car alarms blared as people scurried out of the nearby buildings, running this way and that, trying to escape a formless threat.

  As Vail made her way toward the area where the perp was standing when they shot him, she became aware of her phone ringing—and vibrating violently in her pocket.

  Vail stopped and brought the handset to her face.

  “Agent Vail, this is Director Knox.”

  A call from the FBI director? On a Saturday night?

  “Yes sir,” she said as she caught a glimpse of Robby starting to sift through the rubble. “Can you speak louder?” I just escaped being blown to bits and my hearing’s a bit muffled.

  There was a pause, then, “We’ve got a situation I need you to handle.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the gunshots? Or the bomb that just went off?”

  “Yes. I know you’re on site.”

  Vail looked around, her eyes trying to locate a camera—but she did not see one. “You do?”

  Then she remembered the ShotSpotter system installed around the district: hundreds of acoustic sensors designed to capture and instantaneously pinpoint certain sound frequencies, in particular those
of gunfire.

  “I need you to secure the scene.”

  Vail jerked her head around as sirens blared in the distance. It was muted, but she definitely knew the unmistakable cry of a law enforcement vehicle. “Metro PD’s gonna be here in seconds. Why do you need me to—”

  “You are to take control of that scene. Not Metro PD.”

  “But s—”

  “No buts. Listen to me, Agent Vail. You are to take control of that scene on my authority.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “This is the time to follow orders and not ask questions. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.” Who am I kidding? Hopefully the director.

  “Harlon Filloon, the downed man, is an agent. You’re to protect his identity and keep others—meaning police, medical examiners, forensic personnel—away from his body.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Send Agent Hernandez home. And tell him not to talk with anyone about what he just saw.”

  “Send him home?”

  “I don’t have time to repeat my orders. Do as you’re told. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We’ve dispatched a team that’s four minutes out. Let them in. No one else is to enter that scene. No one. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Who was that?” Robby asked as Vail shoved the phone back in her pocket.

  “You need to leave,” she said, still trying to process what Knox told her—attempting to read between the lines, attempting to understand, attempting to clear her head of the fog induced by the blast. “Go home.”

  Robby tilted his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I can’t say anymore. And you can’t either. Not to anyone.” She started toward the end of the block, where she had been standing when she pulled the trigger. “Just listen to me. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  “What the hell’s going on? Why do I need to go home?”