“Fair enough. And it’s just possible that my awful vector of suspicion may be pointed in the wrong direction.”
“At me, Jon? Me? After all we’ve been through together?”
“Hate to say it, but yes, Osman, even though it absolutely tears me apart to admit it.”
“Well, you can spare yourself that kind of personal agony because I’d never ever go back to the other side. Conversion is conversion. A Judas Iscariot I am not!”
Jon clenched his jaw muscles and rolled his knuckles on the desk. “I’d like to believe that. I really would.” He paused, avoided eye contact with Osman, and stared out the window. Then he turned in his chair and faced al-Ghazali directly. “Yesterday evening, Mort Dillingham called me from Washington. He hated to admit it, he said, but yes, the CIA asked the FBI to check all phone records on all of us during the weeks preceding the theft of the codex and the weeks afterward. After we hung up, Dillingham faxed me this record. It’s a long list, but please note the items I’ve underlined in red.”
He handed Osman the faxed pages. “To the left is your home phone number in Watertown, dated a week before Bartholomew’s flight to the U.S., and to the right… do you see that number in Istanbul?”
“Where?”
Jon pointed.
“Oh… there.”
“It belongs to one Tawfik Barakat, who is a member of the Islam Forever religious party, and one of three men on duty at Istanbul’s airport security the day the patriarch flew off.”
Al-Ghazali reddened a bit. “But… how can that be? Obviously there has to be some… some ridiculous mistake here. Besides, how could the perpetrators know when the patriarch would fly off?”
“Osman, Osman, we had all that information here in Cambridge, and you certainly had access to it.”
A long silence followed, tense and embarrassing to both of them. Finally Osman cleared his throat. “All right, Jon. Very well. I have a long, long story to tell you, and I think you’ll like the ending. But first, might I have a bit more coffee?”
Jon walked over to the hot plate and turned his back to prepare a fresh pot. Carafe in hand, he returned and refilled both mugs. Then he said, “Please continue, Osman. I’m listening… listening quite carefully, in fact.”
Al-Ghazali began with the story of his descent from the great eleventh-century Muslim mystic, Abu-Hamid al-Ghazali, who despised women and hated science in his concern for rigorist orthodoxy. He went on to the story of his childhood in Cairo, while Jon, his patience wearing thin, let his coffee cool. Details of Osman’s schooling followed, until Jon said, “To the point, man, to the point. This is all interesting, but you have a plane to catch, don’t you?”
“All right, Jon, I’ll give you the short version.”
Jon took a long sip of coffee, noting a slightly off flavor. “Almost tastes like Irish coffee. That’s what I get for not giving the carafe a thorough washing. Is yours okay, Osman?”
“Just a little strong.”
Then he continued with the story of his conversion to Christianity and how his eyes were finally opened to the greater historical reliability of the Bible versus the Qur’an. Despite Jon’s advice to move on with his explanation, Osman seemed to continue dawdling. Jon let him speak on, grasping his mug a little unsteadily as he took another long sip. Soon he looked at Osman with some concern because the man was becoming clouded in some sort of haze. But his office was also suffused in a growing fog, and the whole room seemed to lurch to one side. He quickly set the mug down, lest he drop it, and put both hands on the desk to steady himself. But the desk seemed to be tipping and sliding sideways. Was he having a stroke?
Osman watched the changes coming over Jon with quiet satisfaction. The man was starting to shiver and hyperventilate as Osman continued. “But truth to tell, Jon, for all the evidence you tried to marshal on behalf of Christianity, I found that, in the end, I could never give up Islam. Never! I was convinced that I could best help our cause by intruding into your circle.”
Jon tried to reach for his phone, but Osman swiftly pulled it out of his reach. “You won’t need that,” he said. “Of course, I intentionally made that error in the Arabic translation of your book, hoping a fatwa would quickly settle things. But when that failed and you discovered the codex instead, I had to-wait, here, let me help you.”
Al-Ghazali stood and shoved Jon and his chair deep inside the space under the middle of his desk. “You won’t be able to speak, Jon, so why even try? And don’t even think of standing up because you’d fall on your face.”
Jon tried nevertheless. He squirmed feebly in attempting to use his feet to shove the rolling chair away from the desk while his hands reached up to assist by grabbing the desk’s edge. But his grasp faded, and his arms dropped limply on both sides of his chair.
“Probably you’ll recover, Jon,” Osman said, pulling a small, empty vial from his pocket. “It’s an improved version of the old Mickey Finn, but it acts quicker. With any luck, you should get over it in a day or so. Tell you what: we’ve had some good times together, so I’ll even help you recover.” He scribbled chloral hydrate on a slip of paper and stuffed it into Jon’s shirt pocket. “Be glad I didn’t really poison you, chum,” he added. “Call it a parting gift.”
Just then he heard the long, grinding sound of a huge garbage truck outside the back windows of Jon’s office. “And, oh yes, the codex.” Al-Ghazali picked up the tome, went to the back window of Jon’s office, broke out the screen, and heaved the codex directly into the compacting maw of the garbage truck. “There! Your precious codex is exactly where it belongs, thanks to Waste Management. Live a good life, Jon!”
Al-Ghazali hurried out of the office, relieved that Marylou Kaiser had apparently gone to lunch. He would be over the Atlantic before Jon could even control his tongue. It would also be a one-way trip for Osman since he had planned to flee the U.S. for the past several weeks, suspecting that the discovery of his true role in Jon’s circle was only a matter of time.
Several hours later, he was aboard EgyptAir Flight 986 to Cairo. He gazed out the window, a low smile forming on his lips. Suddenly, though, they formed a pout instead. What utter fools those Turks were, he mused, trying to get a ransom for the codex when I had told them simply to destroy it. Well, he had corrected their wretched mistake. Allah would be more than merciful.
Marylou Kaiser came back from lunch, walked into Jon’s office, and screamed. Jon was sitting at his desk, motionless, glassy-eyed, and unresponsive. In a frenzy, she dialed 911. When the paramedics arrived, they quickly suspected a stroke of some kind-not poisoning: this was Harvard, after all. One of them, however, saw Jon’s half-empty coffee mug and tasted it. Then he spat it out and grumbled, “Irish coffee. Evidently these Harvard sages start drinking early and often.”
They strapped Jon onto a stretcher and carried him downstairs and out into an ambulance that had invaded the sacred turf of the Yard. Although nearly comatose, he started mumbling things like “Kowbage,” “Gowbage,” “Tuck,” and finally “Truck.” But no one understood him. Sirens wailing, the ambulance sped eastward on Massachusetts Avenue, crossed the Charles River bridge, and delivered him to ER at Mass General Hospital.
Marylou had, of course, accompanied Jon in the ambulance, and Shannon soon arrived from Weston, pale and shaken. The only one with some context for Jon’s situation, Marylou finally started interpreting his mumbles. “Police,” she translated from “powice,” “garbage” from “cowbage,” and “poison” from “pawzun.” None of it made sense, except for poison and police, and the latter were summoned immediately.
The ER at Mass General was crowded with patients on the road either to death or to recovery assisted by vast arrays of high-tech equipment. In one of the curtained cubicles surrounding its central core, Jon was starting to fight with his restraints. One of the supervisory nurses saw it and quickly injected a sedative. Marylou had the presence of mind to object. “No,” she said, “I wish you hadn’t done that. He’s trying to regain control. What he needs, I think, is the opposite of a sedative.”