“And you?” Fiona asked. “How do you fit in with all of this?”
He gave her a squeeze. “Just lucky, I guess.”
EPILOGUE
THE SENIOR STAFF WAS ASSEMBLED ON THE AFT HELICOPTER pad when George Adams brought Hali Kasim back to the ship from a Tripoli hospital. Hux had a wheelchair standing by, and she turned away from the chopper as it flared in over the Oregon’s fantail.
The skids kissed dead center. Gomez killed the turbines. Everyone rushed forward under the spinning blades to pound on the rear door glass, laughing and aping for Hali as he sat strapped in, a johnny pulled loosely over his heavily bandaged chest. He’d undergone five hours of surgery to repair the damage Assad’s bullet had done to his internal organs and endured a week of hospital food before his doctors would allow him to leave.
But he was the last of them home after what had been perhaps the toughest mission the Corporation had ever undertaken. At dawn, they had rendezvoused with their two wandering lifeboats full of ex-prisoners. The Foreign Minister already had his old job back and was at the conference. Adams had picked up Linda and the others from the desert cave not long afterward. When they had emerged from the cavern, they discovered Professor Emile Bumford bound and gagged at the entrance. The two gundogs who’d gone into the drink during the attack on the Sidrahad been picked up, half-drowned, by the rescue Zodiac with nothing worse than flash burns on their hands and faces. Hux and her staff had patched them up, tended Alana’s hands and Eric’s shoulder, and removed what seemed like a pound of stone shrapnel from the group Mark dubbed the “Fantastic Four.”
Alana had remained on the Oregonfor just a night. She was anxious to return to Arizona and her son. Unfortunately, without any kind of provenance and with its crystal ruined, no one would risk their career by saying definitively if the necklace she’d found was indeed the fabled Jewel of Jerusalem. The real team of archaeologists who’d been excavating the Roman villa had been sent into the caverns after the pall of smoke had been extracted. The Saqrhad been reduced to ashes, and only the gold remained in the side chamber. But it in itself was a numismatist’s wildest dream come true. The gold was mostly in the form of coins from every nation of Europe and every corner of the old Ottoman Empire, stretching back hundreds of years. It was the accumulated hoard of generations of the Al-Jama family, and even the most conservative estimate put the coins’ worth ten times higher than the value of the gold alone.
The delegates at the Tripoli Accords had already declared that the proceeds of the sale of so many perfectly preserved and diverse coins would help fund antipoverty programs across the Muslim world. And that was only the beginning of the sweeping reforms the leaders had on the table.
A half dozen helping hands eased Hali Kasim out of the chopper and into the waiting wheelchair.
“You don’t look so bad to me,” Max said, wiping at his eyes.
“I’m still on pain meds, so I don’t feel so bad either,” Hali replied with a grin.
“Welcome back.” Juan shook his hand. “You sure took one for the team this time.”
“I’ll tell you, Chairman, I don’t know what was worse: getting shot or getting so completely bamboozled. Mossad agent, my brown butt. I just hope he suffered in the end.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Linc said. “Lung shot’s about the worst way to go.”
The bright note about the archaeological finds from the tomb were the three books Alana had managed to save. One was Henry Lafayette’s Bible, which he’d left with his mentor, and another was Suleiman Al-Jama’s personal Koran. The third was a detailed treatise on ways the two great religions could and should coexist if all of the faithful were strong enough to live up to the moral standards set down in the sacred texts. The writing had already been authenticated, and while some of the diehards called it a forgery and a Western trick, others—many, many others—were heeding the Imam turned pirate turned peacenik’s words.
No one kidded themselves, least of all Juan Cabrillo, that terrorism was about to end, but he was optimistic that it was on the wane. He’d have no problem with that, even if it meant that the Oregonwould head for the breaker’s yard and he would light out for a tropical retirement.
Everyone followed Hali as he was wheeled into the ship except for Max and Juan. They lingered over the fantail next to the Iranian flag their ship sported. Water churned in the big freighter’s wake as she started to get under way again.
Max took out his pipe and jammed it between his teeth. The fantail was too windy and exposed to light it. “Couple pieces of good news for you. A team of NATO commandoes raided the new base Ghami’s people were building in the Sudan. With their leader imprisoned, they put up only token resistance. Not so, however, the ones still in Libya. The last of them tried to storm the prison where he’s being held.”
“And . . .” Juan prompted.
“Shot dead, to a man. A single guard was killed by a suicide blast when he tried to take one of them prisoner. Oh, hey,” Max exclaimed, suddenly remembering something, “I read your final report this morning about this whole fur ball. Question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“On the Sidra, when you went back after the Secretary told you not to shoot Ghami’s bodyguard . . .”
“Mansour.”
“Right, him. You wrote you kneecapped him. Is that true?”
“Absolutely,” Juan said without taking his eyes off the horizon. “Marquis of Queensbury rules, remember? Those are the restrictions we’ve placed on ourselves. Come to think of it, actually, I could have been a little more detailed in the report. I didn’t mention that Mansour was bent over one of his men trying to get his weapon in such a way that his head was on the other side of the knee I blew out. I don’t believe the good Marquis ever said anything about bullets overpenetrating.”
Max chuckled. “I think that’s true. Say, what was it Hux told you just before Hali arrived?”
“I’m not sure if you want to know.” There was an odd undercurrent in Juan’s voice. “I’m still trying to get my mind around it.”
“Go ahead, I can take it,” Max said in a way to lighten the suddenly somber mood.
“She managed to analyze the fluid that leaked out of the jewel. It was pretty degraded, and there was only a minute amount, so she can’t verify her findings. Her official report states ‘inconclusive.’ ”
“But . . . ?”
“It was human blood.”
“Could be anybody’s. Al-Jama might’ve made that jewel himself and used his own.”
“Carbon dating puts the sample between fifty b.c. and eighty a.d. The real kicker is, she only found female DNA.”
“It’s a woman’s blood?”
“No, the chromosomes proved the blood came from a man, only he had one hundred percent mitochondrial DNA, even outside the mitochondria, and please don’t ask me to explain. Hux tried and just gave me a headache. Bottom line is, the mitochondrial DNA is only passed on to us through our mothers.”
Max felt a chill despite the balmy weather. “What does it mean?”
“It means that the mother of whoever that blood belonged to provided all his DNA. One hundred percent. The father made zero contribution. It was almost as if he didn’t exist.”
“What are you saying?”
“Her words were something like if she were to imagine the blood work of a person who was of virgin birth, what we found was it.”
“Jesus.”
Max said it as a blasphemous expression of awe, but Juan responded to his comment anyway. “Apparently.”