Covenant A Novel

NAHAL OZ

GAZA STRIP


The night was a blessing that shielded his movements and deadened the sound of his footfalls. Car horns sounded from a main road nearby, voices responding in a babble of angry Arabic and Urdu, then fell silent as the whisper of a vehicle’s tires faded into the distance. The Gaza Strip slumbered beneath a heavy blanket of heat as Rafael drifted through alleyways and across rubble-strewn ground.

The Gaza Strip was never silent. Voices carried on the warm breeze from the coast, sometimes seeming almost upon his shoulder, as though the entire population were watching him. Sound travels farther at night, and among the densely packed buildings it seemed to turn corners, taunting his movements as idle conversations spilled from darkened houses onto the night air.

It was not the first time that Rafael had been required to infiltrate the Gaza Strip. From time to time he had been paid by Byron Stone to eliminate troublesome figures that haunted this land and the innumerable wretches who scratched out an existence from its unyielding soil. He had few qualms about lancing such abscesses of violence. Men killed. It was not cultural, tribal, or even a family thing. As a young soldier he had witnessed both the horror of conflict and the macabre euphoria of taking a life in the defense of one’s own.

Rafael killed only those whom he judged unworthy of life, and killed silently and quickly no matter how grotesque the crimes of his victims. Once they were dead, that was the end of it. The flatulent wittering of psychologists and philosophers did not interest him, especially since killing had earned Rafael far more money than he had ever earned in the service of his country.

He slowed and crouched like a cat in the darkness as a small knot of Palestinian teenagers sauntered past nearby. The tips of their cheap cigarettes glowed like beacons in the night, flaring into life and illuminating dark faces scarred by years of hardship.

Rafael had earned his battle honors in a dozen conflicts, the last of which had been fought amid the derelict streets of Chechnya. Working as a mercenary in the north of the country, he had been caught in the midst of a brutal firefight between Chechnyan rebels and Russian Spetsnaz forces. Rafael had killed a Russian radio operator and captured his set. Fluent in Russian, as he was in so many languages and dialects, he had quickly called in an air strike against a militant position while giving the coordinates of the Russian forces.

Somehow, the coup failed: the Spetsnaz had foiled his plan, probably possessing a backup radio set within their team. The air strike arrived and decimated half of his fellow fighters. Instantly, the hard-core fanatics suspected betrayal, and the mujahideen were upon him. Overpowered by men of his blood and his lands and yet ignoring his explanations, he was bound and taken to a place in the bleak eastern hills where he learned the true nature of faith and what it made men capable of.

There was no Geneva Convention for those held by men who opposed the very society that created it. Rafael was stripped naked, beaten with hoses and batons, and then drenched with ice water before being locked in a tiny basement cell, the stones in the walls worn smooth by the clawing of desperate fingers from time immemorial. The militants wanted to know for whom he had been working, where they were based, and how to obtain access to them, for they believed that his mind had somehow been violated and that Allah had sent him to them for what they euphemistically referred to as “cleansing.” When Rafael was unable to provide them with suitable answers, they attached electrodes to his genitals and cranked them from the mains, searing his body with white pain that left him weeping. When that failed to bring forth the answers they required, they severed two of his fingers with jagged, rusty knives and abandoned him in his cell, accompanied by crippling cold and the raging infections that coursed through his body.

Somewhere in the bleak hours between life and oblivion he was liberated by a small handful of his captors who opposed his detainment. From within the depths of his suffering, Rafael realized that even in the presence of utter barbarianism some souls harbored morsels of humanity, like lonely flowers blossoming amid smoldering plains of ash. Having correctly deduced that Rafael could not have endured such torture unless innocent, and at great risk to themselves, his saviors had spirited him away and placed him in a safe house until he recovered.

Since then, Rafael had been a man on a mission for both himself and for humanity. His work had carried him around the world in the pursuit of criminals and terrorists; Mafioso henchmen in Palermo, Sendero Luminoso assassins in Peru, corrupt police organizing abductions in Colombia, and al-Qaeda cells all over the globe. Ironically, taking out the terrorists had turned out to be far safer than working as a soldier. Hatred of extremists seemed a universal theme. Rafael had realized that nobody cared if an al-Qaeda operative was found facedown in a sewer conduit in Berlin with a crowbar lodged in his skull, or in flames by the side of a lonely desert road in Kashmir, or hanged from the roof beams of a church in Santiago. Rafael’s work was the only perfect murder: one where nobody gave a damn about finding the perpetrator, and he was proud to serve MACE in eliminating terrorists.

The sound of a distant car jerked him from his reverie. The kids had vanished, and Rafael moved out across the open ground and disappeared into an alley. At the end of the alley was a narrow street faintly illuminated by a light somewhere off to the left. Few of the streetlights in this part of the Strip worked with any reliability, a further aid to his movement.

Opposite the alley was a four-story building, one side of which hung in chunks of tattered masonry and steel shattered by countless mortar rounds and aerial incendiaries. The other side of the building was intact but clearly abandoned.

It was a common tactic of insurgents to occupy recently bombed buildings. The Israelis, having blasted them to pieces, would consider their job done and move on to other more interesting targets. Insurgents would occupy those shattered hulks and use them as storage depots, hideouts, and, in this case, entrances to tunnels dug beneath the foundations of the abandoned buildings. It was much harder for Israel to spot tunnels that began beneath buildings than it was to identify those that fed from the Gazan border into the smuggling network beneath Egypt.

The building was the third such location that Rafael had checked since slipping into Gaza an hour previously. The first two had been empty, a fact quickly confirmed by Rafael’s observation that they sat unguarded. This one was different. Sitting on a doorstep outside the building, a watchful Palestinian teenager smoked a cigarette. The building had no visible lights and indeed was unlikely to have any running water. Therefore, the foot soldier was guarding something that lay within. Insurgent groups used a network of teenage layabouts to run errands or keep an eye on sensitive locations, far too many for Israel’s intelligence organizations to run tabs on or interrogate.

Quietly, Rafael slipped out of the shadows and sauntered with his hands in his pockets across the road. Although he looked directly at the young man, his senses scanned like radar up and down the street on either side of him. The area was deserted, as he had expected at this time of the night. Gaza was not so much governed by Hamas’s police as ruled with an iron fist, and anybody out at night was likely to attract their attention. For that reason, he would have to be quick.

The teenager saw him the instant he emerged from the shadows, suddenly trying to look tough rather than bored. He flicked the butt of his cigarette away.

Rafael, having removed his scarf, revealed a set of neat white teeth.

“Salaam,” he said softly.

The boy nodded once, looking Rafael over. “You should not walk the street at night. It is forbidden.”

“I’m on my way home,” Rafael replied easily, producing a packet of his own cigarettes. “Would you care for one?”

The youngster looked at the proffered packet, and then at the butt he had flicked onto the street before him. “I just had one.”

“Ah,” Rafael nodded, “but these are American, Marlboro. Have one for later.”

The teenager’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and he reached out for the cigarette that poked from the open pack.

There was no haste in Rafael’s movement, even though it happened in a blur. As the teenager’s fingers settled on the cigarette, Rafael let the packet go, gripping the boy’s left hand in his own and twisting it sideways across the palm, yanking it hard as he stepped in.

The boy’s shoulder turned in sympathy with the pain as he struggled up onto one foot, his mouth gaping open to cry out. Rafael’s right hand whipped between them, a blade glittering in the streetlight before he slammed it hilt deep into the young man’s throat, slicing into his windpipe and snatching the call from his lips.

The boy lurched but Rafael picked the body up under his arm with immense strength and rushed across the street into the darkness of the alleyway opposite. He crouched down and clamped one hand across the boy’s mouth before turning the blade in his throat and pulling it hard to one side. A crisp sound like splitting fresh lettuce issued as the blade left the boy’s throat, followed by a deep gurgling as blood flooded his lungs. Rafael closed his eyes, holding the boy and gently stroking his hair until he stopped struggling, only the occasional twitch of his limbs betraying the last vestiges of life. A final gush of blood onto his grubby T-shirt and the boy fell limp.

“Go in peace, my young friend, ma’assalama,” Rafael whispered softly, and set the body gently down in the darkness.

He turned and walked back across the street, slipping the blade into his jacket and pulling the scarf up across his face before reaching the door of the building and quietly slipping inside.





That’s ridiculous.”

Rachel Morgan gazed at Hassim Khan as though he had just grown horns. Ethan too found himself intrigued by Hassim’s casual degradation of the miracle of life.

“Life is debris?” he asked.

“And nothing more,” Hassim replied. “It is a scientific fact that was uncovered decades ago. It concerns the fabric of our entire cosmos, everything that we are and everything that we’re made of, changing over time.”

“Then how come we don’t all know about it?” Ethan challenged.

“A question that I too would like answered. If all people were educated about the fundamental origin of life, then there would be far more understanding in the world.”

Rachel shook her head.

“How can life be everywhere and be debris? It doesn’t make sense.”

Hassim shrugged.

“When our universe was born in the Big Bang, it consisted of about three-quarters hydrogen, a quarter helium, a smattering of lithium and deuterium, and nothing else.”

“How do you know that?” Rachel asked.

“Because it still does,” Hassim said. “The rest of the universe’s mass is made up of dark matter and dark energy, substances about which we know very little indeed.”

“And we’re the debris?” Mahmoud asked.

“Absolutely,” Hassim said. “Look at yourself. Look at the room you’re in, the earth that we’re standing on, the air that you’re breathing. Think about anything chemical at all in this universe. Then think about what you’ve just learned. A universe filled with swiftly cooling hydrogen and helium gas, unknown dark materials, and nothing else at all.”

Ethan thought for a moment.

“We must have been created after the Big Bang.”

“Exactly,” Hassim said. “People think that the universe came into being containing everything within it and that stars, planets, and life evolved thereafter over immense periods of time. This is basically correct but it misses a most important point: that the young universe contained no heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, and so on—nothing that makes solid matter like planets, trees, oceans, or people.”

“So where did it come from?” Ethan asked.

“Stars,” Hassim replied. “They all form from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas that collapse under their own gravity, creating pressure and heat within. When the core of the cloud gets hot enough, it shines with nuclear fusion, just as our sun does now. What’s happening inside is that the hydrogen fuel is being converted into heat and light as atoms of hydrogen fuse together under the immense gravitational pressure: fusion. The thing is, when this occurs, only a small percentage of the mass of each atom is released. The rest remains within, and so the two nuclei fuse and create a new element, helium.”

“Which was already present in the universe,” Rachel said.

“Yes,” Hassim agreed. “From this process, a helium core grows inside the star, and when it’s big enough, it too begins burning with nuclear fusion, creating carbon. In stars, the deeper you go, the heavier the elements you find being created, all the way up to iron, if the star is large enough. When these stars exhaust all of their fuel, they blast their material out into space in supernova explosions to become part of the interstellar medium from which new stars are made. As the heavier elements build up in space after each generation, so the next generation of stars have an abundance of heavy elements that form planets and comets and asteroids in orbit around them: the things that we’re made from.”

Rachel blinked in surprise. “That’s where the Earth came from?”

“Yes,” Hassim said. “The process is called nucleosynthesis. This is where you get the sodium in common salt, the neon in fluorescent lights, and the magnesium in fireworks, not to mention the zinc in your hair, the calcium in your bones, and the carbon in your brain. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood shares the same origin as the iron in the rocks of our planet. In your body there’s enough iron to make a three-inch nail, enough carbon to make nine hundred pencils, enough phosphorous to make two thousand match heads, and enough water to fill a ten-gallon tank. We are all chemical beings.”

“And all of this is ‘old news’?” Ethan asked.

“The physics behind all of this was worked out in the 1950s and early 1960s, using Einstein’s general relativity,” Hassim said. “Scientists like Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, and William Fowler did all the calculations long ago, and they’ve all been proven right with further actual observation of the stars using spectroscopy. William Fowler won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for the work done. But it’s generally unknown within the public domain, and powerful faith movements prefer it to remain so. Their beliefs are all based upon a human-centric view of the universe, but nucelosynthesis proves that all life is merely a product of natural processes and not unusual or even unique to our world, their disinformation just a smoke screen to deceive the public.”

“But why does that make Lucy’s discovery so important to you?” Rachel asked.

“For two reasons,” Hassim explained. “Firstly, if genetic material from the remains that Lucy found can be extracted and analyzed, it may show what evolutionary path life has followed through natural selection on other worlds. And secondly, it proves what we already suspect: that life is as common as the stars that fuel its existence.”

“Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone,” Rachel murmured, “and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.”

Ethan began to realize the scope of what Hassim was saying, and suddenly the existence of extraterrestrials didn’t seem quite so ridiculous after all.





Rafael slipped through the door of the building and closed it behind him. An archaic iron lock protruded from the door. On an impulse he turned the key, locking the door from the inside, and slipped it into his pocket before taking in his surroundings.

Musty odors of dust and desiccated soil stained the air; chunks of dislodged masonry and shattered bricks littered the floor. Letting his eyes adjust before daring to move, he saw the faint outlines of a crumbling stairwell leading up and away to his left, and a narrow corridor ahead of him that led into the gloomy depths of the building.

He was about to venture forward into the corridor when he noticed a single door to his left, just before the stairwell. It stood ajar, and he crept toward it, reaching for his knife before swinging the door open.

A large gib frame stood in the center of the room. Atop the frame was a barrel-sized coil of thick rope, from the end of which dangled a heavy iron hook. To Rafael’s right, an unused diesel generator crouched above patches of fuel staining the dusty floorboards.

Rafael edged forward, and in the dim light he saw a large rectangular hole hewn from the living earth, an impenetrable blackness that plunged to unknown depths beneath the city. On the far side of the hole, a rope ladder was tied to two stakes driven deep into the earth, the ladder vanishing down into the darkness.

Rafael squatted at the edge of the tunnel entrance and listened intently.

No sound emanated from within, although he could feel the hot air from the underground tunnels wafting toward him as though the ancient soil was breathing. He knew that there would be other entrances and exits from this tunnel, providing some meager ventilation to those hiding or incarcerated within.

He closed his eyes, orienting himself within the building to the street outside, picturing the layout of the nearby streets. He recalled the single glowing streetlight perhaps a hundred yards to his left. Power was intermittent in Gaza and electricity cables were often run directly down the tunnels by insurgents, using either the grid or generators to supply light to the depths. This tunnel would most likely pass close by the streetlight, an easy point at which to tap into the electricity supply. From there, he suspected that a row of buildings on the opposite side of the street provided a likely termination point, an escape route for Hamas fighters fleeing an Israeli assault.

Rafael pocketed his blade and moved around to the ladder, carefully testing its strength before lowering himself into the darkness.





The remains Lucy found were similar to humans,” Rachel said. “You think that life on other planets is like life on Earth?”

Hassim Khan shook his head.

“That’s unlikely. Life on other planets will endure differing environments. If a planet orbiting another star was more massive than Earth, then its gravity would be correspondingly higher, resulting in species of a more muscular build to counter their increased weight on such a planet. That could match the physicality of the species Lucy found.”

“But it looked almost human to me,” Ethan said, “just a lot bigger. Surely that can’t be possible on an entirely different planet?”

“Evolution often follows certain paths,” Hassim explained. “There are facets of biological species that often appear as a result of natural selection, especially in predatory species. Limbs, eyes, ears, grasping hands and so on appear frequently in the fossil record. There is no reason to think that this would not occur on other planets too.”

Ethan sat in thought for a moment.

“Do you think that genetic material could be extracted from Lucy’s find?”

“Almost certainly.” Hassim nodded. “Researchers have successfully extracted intact blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone some sixty-five million years old. The remains that Lucy found were only seven thousand years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to recover organic material from it, maybe even intact DNA.”

“Which would confirm the idea of life forming on a universal theme,” Ethan guessed.

Hassim smiled.

“The origin of life among the stars as a universal and not a local event,” Hassim agreed. “It’s known as panspermia.”

“You mean that we didn’t evolve on Earth?” Rachel stammered.

“Oh, we evolved here all right,” Hassim corrected. “But the very things we are made of did not, and that may include life in all of its self-replicating glory. It has been known for some time that when giant stars die in supernova explosions, the material they release in the cooling conditions contain carbon grains, and that particles of other chemical elements attach themselves to the tiny grains and react enthusiastically with each other. These carbon grains were given a name: stardust.”

“Grains?” Ethan asked. “Like sand?”

“Much smaller,” Hassim said. “Spectroscopic studies of these star-remnant molecular clouds have found there the presence of methanimine, formaldehyde, formic acid, amine groups, and long-chain hydrocarbons caught within their veils. These are the building blocks of life: methanimine is an ingredient in amino acids; formic acid is the chemical that insects use as venom and is also the stinging ingredient in nettles. Both are polyatomic organic molecules that combine to form the amino acid glycine, which has since been seen in molecular clouds in deep space and found in comets by NASA in 2009, and amino acids are one step away from life itself.”

“And that’s without planets forming?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” Hassim said. “Ultraviolet radiation bathes the clouds, heat from other nearby stars warms them, and all manner of chemical reactions occur. Frozen water, methanol, and ammonia rapidly form around the grains as the heat from the supernova fades. Trapped within these tiny cores the elements react and produce various polyatomic molecules. Experiments carried out in 2001 at NASA’s Ames Research Center confirmed these processes, when silicate grains covered in this kind of material were chilled to the temperature of deep space and suspended in ultraviolet light. When the organic compounds produced were immersed in water, membranous cell structures appeared spontaneously, as they may well have done on the young Earth: life, without supernatural intervention. All life on Earth is based on cells such as these, biological material encased in a membrane.”

“It all fits together,” Ethan said, genuinely amazed.

“That’s what science does. In 2002,” Hassim went on without missing a beat, “further experiments conducted with water, methanol, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide found in molecular clouds discovered that three amino acids called glycine, serine, and alanine arose spontaneously within the containers. In another similar experiment, no less than sixteen amino acids and other organic compounds were produced under the conditions that exist between the stars using nothing more than the ingredients of molecular clouds. The proteins of all living things on Earth are composed of combinations of twenty amino acids.”

Ethan grasped where Hassim was going just before Rachel did.

“All life might be very similar in a fundamental way,” he said.

“Yes,” Hassim agreed, and tapped his own chest. “The chemical reactions that support metabolism in all of our bodies involve just eleven small carbon molecules such as acetic and citric acids. These eleven molecules would have been sufficient to produce chemical reactions that led to the development of biomolecules such as amino acids, lipids, sugars, and eventually early genetic molecules like RNA on Earth. Metabolism came first, the fuel for life, before cells or replication or anything else. Life then followed as a natural result of chemical metabolism. If it happened here on Earth, then it could happen anywhere on suitable planets harboring liquid water, and life might follow a similar path of evolutionary development that leads eventually to intelligence.”

Rachel caught on quickly.

“And if an intelligent species evolved on a planet reasonably close by, and was only ten thousand years more advanced than us …”

“Even a thousand years more advanced might do it,” Hassim said. “In two hundred years mankind has gone from wooden sailing ships and witchcraft to landing on the moon and nuclear power. Think what we could be like in another thousand years.”

“It would look like magic,” Ethan said, remembering Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. “Or God. But could they be that much more advanced than us?”

“The universe has been producing stars for over thirteen billion years,” Hassim explained, “and the elements required for life have been in place within galaxies for at least eight billion years. By our planet’s timeline of evolution, it’s quite possible that advanced, intelligent life has existed in our universe for the past four billion years or so. The technology of such civilizations could be advanced on a scale completely unimaginable to us.”

“If so,” Ethan challenged, “then why would they bother with us at all?”

“We can only speculate,” Hassim admitted, “but such civilizations may well have been forced to travel through space as their parent stars aged and became unstable: the window in which our own Earth can support complex life is surprisingly short in cosmological terms, ending as the sun grows hotter and Earth is no longer able to harbor liquid water. However, although life may be common in the universe, intelligent life will be much rarer, and if you were an advanced race traveling the stars and found early humans struggling to survive after a climatic disaster, wouldn’t you be tempted to stop and help them or at least investigate?”

Rachel stood up, pacing again as she struggled with the consequences of her newfound knowledge.

“But if this actually happened, surely our ancestors with their newly acquired skills might have recorded it better, in more detail?”

“Perhaps they did,” Hassim said. “But we haven’t learned to recognize the signs for what they are yet.”

“How do you mean?” Ethan asked.

“Imagine,” Hassim suggested, “that you’re living in ancient Egypt, before the pyramids or technology, and down from the skies come beings that reveal great knowledge to you and then vanish again. As you struggle to capitalize upon this new knowledge, would you not be tempted to beg them for help, to make contact again?”

“I guess so,” Ethan agreed.

“And how would you do that?” Hassim asked.

“I’d make a sign,” Ethan said cautiously, “in the ground or something.” Then he got it. “A big sign, big enough to see from the air.”

“Exactly,” Hassimm nodded. “You’d create megastructures, hoping that your mysterious flying benefactors would see them and return.”

Rachel seemed bemused.

“You’re talking about the pyramids, aren’t you?”

“Not just the pyramids,” Hassim replied. “Almost every major ancient megastructure, and I can prove it too. Have either of you heard of something called a cargo cult?”

Rachel was about to answer, but Mahmoud got up from the crate upon which he had been sitting and looked at her.

“Whatever your daughter was dabbling in, it is better left alone. There are some things we weren’t meant to see,” he warned before looking at Yossaf. “Time to check the tunnels.”

Ethan watched as the two Palestinians went in opposite directions.

“Why would MACE abduct Lucy when they could just have taken the remains and left her there?” he asked Hassim.

“The reason for that, my friend,” Hassim said, “is almost too horrific to speak of.”





Rafael crouched at the bottom of the ladder, enveloped in near pitch-blackness but for the glow of a low-watt lightbulb flaring some ten meters down the narrow, craggy walls of the tunnel.

He crept away from the ladder, careful to avoid the electrical cables secured with lengths of string that ran along the upper-left corner of the tunnel. The smuggling tunnels were periodically bombed by Israel, and as a result the Palestinians bothered little with such trivial concerns as electrical insulation.

The heat clung like a blanket to Rafael’s skin as he edged forward, holding his knife in a loose grip. He had no idea how many men might be hiding down in the tunnels, nor how they were armed. If he encountered anyone, they would have to be dispatched quickly and silently.

The harsh light of the bulb ahead obscured the tunnel beyond, preventing Rafael from seeing more distant threats. A small fly buzzed lazily around the light, entrapped beneath the earth. Rafael kept his gaze downward, sensing for movement ahead on the upper periphery of his vision as he ducked beneath the bulb. He crouched to avoid casting long shadows down the tunnel, and then peered ahead into the gloom.

Perhaps five meters or so ahead the tunnel turned right, to where a faint patch of light glowed from some unseen source. Rafael observed a particularly large cable entombed in the wall of the tunnel and guessed he was beneath the streetlight he had seen, the tunnel’s electrical supply spliced into the mains. That would mean that the tunnel indeed terminated beneath the houses at the opposite end of the street. He recalled that several were abandoned buildings, the skeletal remains of Palestinian homes and businesses pounded into oblivion by Israel.

He crept toward the curve in the tunnel and was halfway there when a flicker of a shadow drifted across the patch of light. Rafael froze and crouched down again.

The shadow began moving toward him.

Then he heard the footfalls. Urgent synapses fired across his brain, thoughts too rapid to process yet crystalline in their clarity. The shadow moved toward me. Footsteps, heavy, male. Moving slowly.

A chunky figure with broad shoulders and a thick neck appeared in the tunnel, the unmistakable shape of an AK-47 rifle cradled loosely in his grip. Rafael crouched down, concealed in the darkness between the two light sources. Don’t move. Movement is much more dangerous than staying still.

The figure lumbered closer, the footfalls growing louder and heavier, thumping rhythmically with the rolling beats of Rafael’s heart. Move without fear, without tension, without compromise. Breathe. The body now blocked the light from beyond completely, looming to fill Rafael’s field of view.

He relaxed his body and mind, exhaling a ghost’s breath as he did so.

Rafael lunged upward and forward even as the man’s eyes registered the form crouched in the tunnel before him. Rafael’s blade flickered in the weak light and plunged into the man’s throat with a quiet, crisp rasp.

The man’s cry gargled somewhere below his thorax, lost forever as the blade crossed his windpipe and severed his spinal column just above the third vertebra. Rafael caught the man as he fell, his body crumpling onto the ground in the center of the tunnel. He quickly slammed his hand over the man’s bearded mouth, slipping the blade out of his throat as he yanked the head to one side and jabbed the steel upward into his skull. A faint crackling of splintered bone just behind and below the ear, and the body jerked with a series of diminishing spasms before falling still. The undignified odor of spilled feces tainted the hot, stale air as Rafael slipped the blade out of the lifeless skull.

He stood quickly and forged ahead through the tunnel. There was nowhere to hide the body, and it could be discovered at any moment. Time was of the essence.

Ahead, somewhere beyond the turn in the tunnel, the sound of voices reached his ears.





What do you mean horrific?” Rachel asked, concern stretching her skin tightly across her features.

Hassim Khan massaged his temples. “You say that you went to Lucy’s dig site?”

“That was where I got the images on my camera.” Ethan nodded.

“I saw them,” Hassim said. “And the specimen that Lucy discovered was in a crate.”

“Yes, but it hadn’t been sealed yet.”

Rachel looked at Hassim. “What are you thinking?”

“We know that the remains alone are not reason enough for your daughter’s abduction: as you said, they could have left her there.”

“What about money?” Rachel said. “A ransom.”

Hassim shook his head.

“A sale of such remains would be almost impossible to coordinate without being detected by enforcement agencies, and a ransom would come with demands that we haven’t had.”

Ethan leaned back against the wall. “Bill Griffiths is a fossil hunter and he holds the only key to exposing this abduction for what it really is: a theft. He walked away from me when I offered him five million dollars.”

“What then, if not money?” Rachel asked Hassim, her fists clenched by her side.

Hassim stood, pacing as he spoke.

“Your daughter was one of several people to have vanished from that area of the Negev Desert. No remains have ever been found. All of those disappearances have occurred since MACE began working out here in Israel under the AEA’s control.”

“You think that the church is really behind it all?” Ethan asked.

“Their leader, a powerful pastor named Kelvin Patterson, has been a vocal proponent of using science to prove the existence of God, using his television and radio stations to promote his views. He believes that faith has proven itself impotent without knowledge, and is known to have conducted various experiments in the past with volunteers from his church in an attempt to discover the nature of the divine.”

“Experiments?” Rachel asked nervously. “What kind of experiments?”

Hassim’s voice was low, as though he regretted having to speak at all.

“The kind that require live volunteers. But if there are other experiments he wishes to conduct that are illegal, and he requires live bodies, then there are ways to acquire them.”

Rachel seemed to Ethan to be having difficulty breathing as she spoke.

“What might they do to Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But after what has happened to you both they’ll be keen to get the remains out of Israel before you can inform the authorities. Even a fossil hunter as well connected as Bill Griffiths will have difficulty in achieving that without some kind of specialist help.”

Ethan nodded. “He’ll need a company trusted by the Israeli government, just like MACE. I need to make a phone call.”

Hassim looked at Mahmoud as he emerged from one of the tunnels. The Palestinian shook his head.

“You can’t make a call from down here; we’re too deep for a signal and we can’t risk moving at night. We can get you to the Erez crossing at dawn.”

“What time is it?” Ethan asked.

“Two-thirty in the morning,” Hassim said, glancing at his watch.

“That makes it the middle of the afternoon in Chicago. If I can make a call, I can smooth the way for us.”

A look of displeasure creased Mahmoud’s features. “We should wait until Yossaf returns from checking the building.”

“As long as Yossaf is between us and the other exit, we have nothing to fear.”

Mahmoud glanced at Hassim, then sighed and nodded.

“We can use the opposite end of the tunnel and make the call from there. It leads to a building on the far side of the street.”


Rafael, crouched in the darkness, listened intently.

He did not need to see the faces of the people talking a few meters away, hidden from sight by the curving tunnel walls and the shadows. Arabic and American voices left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. The name of a man, Bill Griffiths, drifted to within earshot of his position, and he thought of the fossil hunter employed by Byron Stone and Spencer Malik.

Perhaps aid workers were secretly assisting insurgents? Or maybe journalists had gained access to the tunnels, an event not unknown near Rafah on the Egyptian border. Either way, Rafael would have to work swiftly and without endangering innocent lives.

Slowly, he edged back into the deeper darkness behind him, still with his knife clasped in one hand in case the possessor of the more threatening voice he had heard should choose to wander in his direction.

He turned, moving swiftly past the corpse of the man whose name he now knew had been Yossaf, and moved as swift as a leopard through the darkness toward the distant light ahead. He reached the ladder, pausing only for a few moments to listen for pursuers or for anyone lingering above him at the tunnel entrance before scaling the ladder and emerging into the building above.

He squatted down and reached into his pocket for a small device, the blue glow from the screen lighting his features with a peculiar radiance. The GPS device showed an image of the Gazan streets at the point where he had entered the tunnel. Rafael oriented the device to point north, read the coordinates at the top of the screen, and added two seconds latitude to the west and one to the north for the building the Palestinian had referred to.

Rafael reached again into his pocket for his cell phone, accessing the text menu, and typing in the coordinates from his GPS device. He quickly added a line of text to the message.

TARGET LOCATED, COORDINATES ABOVE.



STRIKE IN TEN MINUTES!!!




Rafael pressed the Send button, waiting until the message was confirmed as sent before pocketing the device and his GPS receiver.

Turning, he gripped the ladder and once again descended into the tunnel.