Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

Omar Yussef frowned and stroked his chin. “I know what you mean,” he said. “How did Ishaq find out?”

“I assume the priest gave us away, because no one else knew. I told Ishaq I had kept his birth a secret for Liana’s sake, but that only made him furious with her, too. The person we loved most in the world turned against us.”

“That leaves you with only one person to love.”

Kanaan flushed beneath his even tan. “I’ll give you anything to keep this quiet.”

“You’re still worried about scandal? The boy is dead.”

“I have to think about my wife. Ishaq’s death has made her-” he looked for the right word “-fragile. I’ll give you anything in my power.”

Omar Yussef stood and stepped toward the French doors. Why does everyone want to conspire with me? he wondered. Do I seem dishonest? Or am I their confessor, like the priests to whom Roman Catholics go for remission of their small, venial sins. A priest can’t forgive mortal sins, though. He tapped his knuckle softly on the glass. Can I?

Khamis Zeydan paced across the lawn with his back to the house. A hoopoe dipped its long, thin beak into the grass and came up with a worm. It skipped a few paces and dropped the worm, picked it up again, extended its wings to show its black and white stripes, and flew into the branches of a sycamore.

Omar Yussef put his hand over his mouth and stroked his chin. He smiled at the stricken face of Amin Kanaan. “There is something I can think of that you can get for me,” he said.

Omar Yussef cut the engine and waited for something in the silence to ambush him. When Khamis Zeydan wheezed, he realized that they had both been holding their breath, anticipating the momentous discovery they hoped to make up the hill and fearful that they would find someone else, someone murderous, searching there too. Stepping out onto the dried pine needles around the jeep, he skirted the woods until he found the path to the Byzantine fort winding around a patch of rocks. Khamis Zeydan’s pistol glinted in the moonlight.

“Put that gun away,” Omar Yussef said. “We might walk into someone perfectly innocent and you’ll have shot them before we get a chance to see who they are.”

“I’ll aim to wound,” Khamis Zeydan whispered. “If there’s anyone up there now, after the gates have been locked, I doubt that they’re innocent.”

“We’ll probably be searching for hours for the place where Ishaq buried those secret documents. If you shoot at some shadow, the whole village will come and catch us. We won’t be able to do this by day without being noticed, and tomorrow the World Bank cuts off its aid. We have to do this tonight. Don’t blow it.”

Khamis Zeydan puffed out his cheeks. He kept his gun hand raised, the barrel pointing at the branches above, and paced carefully ahead of Omar Yussef, as though he expected the ground beneath each advancing step to blow up.

They passed through the break in the fence and the pines started to thin. Stones, long tumbled from the old walls of the fortress, spread irregularly over the hillside like a shoreline wavering in the shifting moonlight.

“Can you make it up here with your foot in that condition?” Omar Yussef asked. “It looks like a rough climb over these fallen blocks.”

“You’d prefer me to wait at the bottom for your corpse to come rolling down?” Khamis Zeydan shook his foot and slapped his thigh to get the blood moving.

“Since you put it that way, my brother,” said Omar Yussef, “stick close.”

He stepped onto one of the stones and saw that his leg shook with fear. His apprehension made him feel foolish. He was a schoolteacher, not a man of action like the policeman who walked behind him, pistol at the ready. Yet here he was, ascending a pile of ancient stones in the night, unsure of what awaited him at the end of his climb.

His ankle turned and his shoe slipped off. He winced, bending to pull it back on, and leaned against a stone to right himself. It was rough with lichen and the weathering of ages. “Now we both have a bad foot,” he said.

“At least I had some fun boozing and eating badly to get mine into the condition it’s in,” Khamis Zeydan said.

“Aren’t we having fun now?”

Khamis Zeydan bent low, the pistol still raised. “I’m loving every minute.” He smiled grimly. “I’m starting to hope there’s actually someone up there.”

“There isn’t.” Omar Yussef flexed his ankle. “The documents Ishaq hid are up there, somewhere near the flat stone where the ancient temple stood. That’s all.”

“It never pays to be surprised. Get yourself ready for a welcoming committee.”

They climbed side by side over the stones. Omar Yussef bowed to use both hands where the slope was most acute. Khamis Zeydan kept his gun in his hand and balanced with his prosthetic limb. They moved quietly, though Omar Yussef thought their labored breathing might as well have been a shout in the hush around them. His pulse thundered in his neck like a Ramadan firecracker.

The spray of rocks on the hillside brought them to a rise at the foot of the fortress’s walls. Beyond a soft dip in the ridge, the stone that had been at the center of the ancient Samaritan temple angled down the slope from the peak of the mountain, a silvery charcoal. At its center, a darker spot marked it. Omar Yussef squinted. The spot on the rock seemed to roll to one side. Is that a shadow cast by the clouds passing across the moon? he wondered. Something stretched out of the darkness at the center of the flat stone. It jerked upward, then it bent. It was an arm.

“Someone’s there,” Omar Yussef said.

They hurried over the grass toward the temple stone.

Omar Yussef stepped onto the holy rock and felt electricity rise through his feet and into his legs. The charge quickened his breath, squeezing his heart between two pounding fists of adrenaline.

The body moved again. An arm flapped, then collapsed with a crack of knuckles against the rock. The forearm, which fell out of a blue gown, was lightly covered in black hair. Omar Yussef went onto his knees and held the outstretched limb, rubbing its cold fingers between his hands.

“Roween, can you hear me?” he said.

The Samaritan woman opened one eye, as far as the contusion surrounding it would allow. A bloodied slash flayed her skin from the bone of her cheek and concealed the other eye. She sucked air desperately over smashed teeth. Her gown rode above her knees, showing her stocky legs, bruised and scratched. She exhaled and Omar Yussef thought it was the death rattle.

Khamis Zeydan turned a full circle. “There’s no one around, as far as I can see,” he said, holstering his pistol.

“Who did this to you, Roween?” Omar Yussef asked, squeezing her fingers.

Roween choked and dribbled blood from the corner of her mouth. “Abisha,” she spluttered.

“The scroll? Did a man named Abisha do this?”

“Abisha.” She gagged again and the force of her coughing almost brought her upright. She grabbed at a pain in her belly and rolled onto her side.

Omar Yussef felt moisture chill his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his cheek and it came away dark. Roween had coughed a spray of blood over him.

“Where are the account details?” Khamis Zeydan knelt beside the battered woman. His voice was harsh and clear. “Where are they?”

They’re in the Abisha Scroll, Omar Yussef thought. She knows we came here to find the secret bank documents. She’s telling us Ishaq hid them inside the scroll’s box. That’s what he meant by ‘behind the temple.’ It has nothing to do with the location of the ancient temple. He meant the silver image of the temple decorating the Abisha’s box. He lifted a hand to restrain Khamis Zeydan. “Let her rest,” he whispered. “She’s nearly gone.”