Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

She came across a batch of old snapshots, scattered between the pages, and studied them closely. She recognized a younger, slimmer Evelyn in some of them, decked out in khaki field pants, mesh hats, and big tortoiseshell sunglasses, and found herself imagining the exciting, unconventional life her mother must have led at the time: a single woman, a Westerner, traveling to exotic, sun-drenched locations, meeting different peoples, immersing herself in their cultures, working with them to explore the hidden treasures of their past. A driven life, to be sure, and more than likely a fulfilling one, but one that had to come at a price, which in Evelyn’s case seemed to be a wistful loneliness, a guarded solitude.

Her fingers paused at a shot of Evelyn standing alone with a man. His features were too obscured by the sunglasses, the shade of his hat, and the downward, slightly turned angle of his face. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. She knew that shot. She’d been given a copy of it when she was seven, which she kept safely tucked into her wallet, always close. The man in the photograph was her father. Evelyn had told her it was the only picture of him she had. They’d only spent a few weeks together. It saddened Mia that she didn’t even know what he really looked like.

She stared wistfully at the photograph, then a troubling realization crept into her mind. Her father was there. He had been with Evelyn when she’d found the underground chambers.

And he’d died a month later. In a car crash.

A sharp pain spiked inside her heart. For a second, it felt as if it stopped beating altogether, and she felt the blood draining from her face.

Corben seemed to spot it. “What is it?”

She handed him the picture. “The man in the picture.” Her words came out as if emerging from a fog. “He was my father. He was there.”

Corben studied her, waiting for more.

“He died a month later. In a car crash.” Her eyes were alight with questions. “What if he was killed? Murdered. Because of this.”

An uncertain look crossed Corben’s features. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing here that indicates that Evelyn had any trouble over this before. If his death was related to all this, then she would have been under threat too. Which doesn’t seem to be the case, I mean, she lived a pretty open life.”

He handed her back the picture. She took another lingering look at it, then nodded. “I guess you’re right,” she conceded.

“I’ll take a look anyway, just to cover all the bases. What was his name?” Corben asked.

“Webster,” Mia said. “Tom Webster.”

The name pummeled Corben like a shotgun blast.

Tom Webster.

Evelyn had tried to reach Tom Webster last night. And mediums didn’t usually call the switchboards of academic institutions to reach the deceased.

He wasn’t dead. At least, Evelyn didn’t think so. He was alive. And she’d lied to her daughter all these years.

Adrenaline surged through Corben. This was important. He had to put a high-priority trace on the name. He needed more information from Mia about where he had supposedly died, what else Evelyn had told her about him, although, given that she’d lied to her about his death, Corben didn’t think anything Mia could tell him about her long-lost father would turn out to be true.

It could wait.

He watched Mia as she put the shot to one side and moved on, checking out a few more shots until her eyes fell on something that seemed to snare her interest.

“The man from the alley. I think that’s him,” she said.

The hakeem adjusted the glass slide under the microscope and tapped a few buttons on his keyboard. Another magnified image came up on the flat screen. He studied it carefully, as he had done with all the data that the tests had thrown up.

She’s clean, he thought. Evelyn’s blood work hadn’t flagged anything unusual. No foreign substances, no tampering. Her readings were in line with what he would expect to find in a reasonably healthy woman of her age.

He stared through the cells on the screen and revisited her words. There was no doubt in his mind that she had told him everything she knew. He was working off a solid base.

Tom Webster. He couldn’t get the name out of his mind.

Could he be one of them?

The possibility electrified him. He ran it through his mind, again and again. It seemed too far-fetched. So many years had passed…. But what other explanation was there? Every time he tried to dismiss the idea, to put another spin on it, his initial suspicion came back, slicing through his doubts with Occam-like sharpness and implanting itself firmly in his consciousness. Why else would he appear like that, unannounced, at the first sign of the discovery, and then disappear when the trail seemed to die out? No, there was no other rational explanation.

He had to be one of them.

Tasked with protecting their secret.

Keeping an eye on archaeological digs in the region, making sure that no one stumbled across something that they had gone to great lengths to suppress. Something they’d kept — something they’d hoarded greedily, he scowled — to themselves for centuries.

His pulse quickened.

He thought back to her pathetic tale of lost love and replayed her story in his mind. The man — Tom Webster, the name was branded onto his consciousness, not that he believed it to be his true name — had swooped in and out of her life with clinical efficiency. The discovery had led nowhere, or so he’d led her to believe. What had he really uncovered, what hadn’t he shared with her? He’d then pulled a disappearing act, leaving her with an unborn child and a numbing spiel about why he couldn’t be with her, for reasons he couldn’t share with her.

Déjà vu.

He’d heard — read, actually — something along those lines before.

Many years ago. Back home, in Italy.

In Naples.

It was part of what had triggered his journey.

Yes, of course, he knew it was something some men said. When they lost interest. When they wanted to move on to new conquests. Chapter one of the idiot’s guide to dating. A he’s-just-not-that-into-you kind of thing. Normally, his cynical, jaded view of humanity would have supported that take on it.

Not this time. This felt different.

It fit.

And the very idea that this Tom Webster could actually be part of something he wasn’t sure even existed, something he doggedly wanted to believe, against all rationale, was out there…He smiled inwardly.

This is real. Just as I always suspected.

The principe was right .

A wave of exhilaration coursed through him, coupled with an anger at the way fate dealt its hand. Evelyn had discovered the chamber in 1977 and left the country three years later. He’d arrived in Iraq a couple of years after that.

He cursed his misfortune.

If he’d been there at the time of the discovery of the chambers, he might have heard about it. He might have met this Tom Webster. And he might already possess what he was searching for.

Fate. Timing. The right place at the wrong time. But maybe this was a chance to make up for it.

He needed to find this Webster. The number Evelyn had for him was in her organizer, in her apartment. Omar and his men should have brought that back from the woman’s apartment, but that effort had been thwarted — he’d have to have a serious talk to someone about that. He knew he could easily find the number using the Internet, but he didn’t expect it to yield much. Webster probably didn’t want to be found. He’d surely covered his tracks.

The hakeem also needed to get his hands on that slippery antiques dealer. He had to get his hands on the book, which he knew could be the key to everything. But this woman and her story…she was, indeed, a godsend. Not that he actually believed in such inanities.