Gregg Loomis - The Sinai Secret

The town was amazingly preserved from its days as a trading center for textiles, fine lace, and intricate gold jewelry some six hundred years past. The silting up of the River Zwin had largely ended its mercantile days, but it had also discouraged replacing tall town houses with more contemporary and far less charming structures, as had happened in so many European cities.

There had been the coldly charmless semidetached in Cambridge, the fourth-story garret in the Sorbonne District of Paris, the wretched and noisy rooms over a Bierstube just outside the university area of Munich, the only quarters worse than the converted barn near Bologna that still leaked hours after a rainfall. Before accepting a post as head of the University of Amsterdam's physics department, he had spent time at half a dozen institutions.

A wandering Jew, he liked to joke.

He rounded a corner, thankful to exit an alley so narrow he could have touched opposing polished doorknobs by stretching out his arms. He breathed deeply in relief.

Relief from what?

He was unsure. He was aware only of an anxiety that had no rational basis. Hardly an emotion to which any scientist would admit.

He crossed the Burg, a pleasant cobbled square consisting of several small restaurants, all closed at this hour. Now he could see the Markt, a thirteenth-century market square lined by tall, stair-step gabled houses, many with brightly painted facades. For reasons he also could not have explained, he was thankful to reach the most brightly lit place in town. Only now did he realize how claustrophobic he had felt in the confines of twisting streets and alleys too narrow for vehicular traffic.

Nonsense, he told himself. He had never feared confined spaces any more than he had standing at the roof edge of tall buildings.

The glances over his shoulder were totally unnecessary.

There was, though, something sinister about this whole trip. The unexpected phone call demanding he bring the CDs containing the protocol of his most recent experiments, a meeting at night in a strange city. Had the call come from anyone else, he would have thought he was speaking to a lunatic.

He settled at a table in one of the few bistros on the square still serving at this hour. A waiter silently materialized, and Benjamin ordered a Brugse Tripel beer. He would have preferred coffee, but caffeine at this hour would keep him awake all night.

Night.

Well after 2200.

The waiter set the beer bottle next to a glass. As was customary for such places, he also left a slip of paper on a small tray, the bill, which Benjamin could pay anytime before leaving. The waiter scurried back to the lights inside. Benjamin poured slowly, intent on the building head of bubbles.

"If you tilt the glass, you will get less of a head."

A man sat down across from him, speaking accented English. He was positioned so that his face was dark while limned by street lamps.

Benjamin squinted, unable to make out more than a featureless dark blur. "I don't recognize your voice. You're not…"

The head shook. "No. I am to take you to him. You have what he requested?"

Benjamin patted his inside jacket pocket as he lifted his glass. "Of course. As soon as I finish. You?"

"No, thanks."

Benjamin emptied the glass and held the tab up to the light from the street. Guessing rather than seeing, he left two euros on the table and stood. "I've spoken with him often, but we met only once. At the beginning. Why now? Why here instead of in Amsterdam, where he can personally inspect what I'm doing?"

The other man either did not hear or, more likely, ignored the questions. He was already hurrying west down Steenstraat. Benjamin caught up, curious as to the need to rush. Perhaps all would be explained shortly. A left turn down Mariastraat past the Welcome Church of Our Lady, its spire, the tallest in Belgium, stabbing the night as it glowed in beams cast by lights at its base. Right turn along the east-west canal. The steep-gabled, tall town houses had given way to modest two-story brick buildings whose steep eaves had sloughed off snow for over five hundred winters.

The man stopped and pointed to a bench under a tree with roots running down to the canal. Across a narrow street was a house with a depiction of a swan on it. A small hotel. That made sense. It was the type of accommodation the man Benjamin had come to see might choose: both luxurious and inconspicuous.

"Wait here."

Benjamin started to protest, then thought better of it and sat facing water so still that the warm light from the hotel's windows swam on the surface. On a spring night like this, sitting outside was comfortable. Perhaps the man feared some sort of listening devices might be in the walls of the hotel. Benjamin could fully understand why the man would want whatever he had to say not to be overheard. The project was best kept quiet until completed. There would be those who would very much like to see that it never was.

Benjamin heard footsteps and started to rise.

He felt something cold and hard against the base of his skull, cold and hard like steel.

Like a gun's barrel.

But why?

He heard a puff, a mere whisper, and brilliant lights exploded from somewhere behind his eyes. He felt no pain, only the firmness of the earth beneath him.

And someone's hand groping his inside jacket pocket.

Then all went black and he felt nothing.

Manuel's Tavern

Highland Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia

8:30 p.m. EST

The Same Night

The original part of Manuel's Tavern dated back to the early 1950s. It consisted of stools along a bar and wooden booths, now time-worn and inscribed with graffiti from generations of students. Then, as now, it was a rendezvous for local Democratic politicos, university intelligentsia, and those who would like to become any of the above. Manuel had chosen wisely, locating his establishment across the street from the border of the Southern Methodist/Baptist-controlled county in which Emory University was located. The bar had been an oasis of beer and free thought on the edge of a Sahara of proclaimed abstinence and intolerance Never mind that the greatest amount of liquor tax collected in the state at that time came from those purveyors of the devil's elixir just across that same line, stores that supplied unmarked grocery bags and boxes to conceal the potables their customers hauled back into forbidden territory.

As racial and economic diversity blurred old and perhaps outdated values, even when alcohol became legal across the street Manuel's remained quirky. While gracious lots with lovely homes were subdivided into new look-alike neighborhoods of "affordable housing," the bar remained a bit risque, a reputation subsequent owners had done little to alter. As the years passed, it had morphed into a watering hole for not only the left-of-center but also the social contrarian and the downright funky.

A black man wearing a clerical collar and a white man in lawyer camouflage of dark suit and power tie drew no special attention. They were steady customers, always taking the same booth, continually arguing and complaining, frequently in Latin, about the poor quality of food for which Manuel's was famous.

"Corruptio optimi pessima," the priest said, reaching for a half-empty pitcher of lukewarm beer.

"No doubt corruption of the best is worst, Francis," the white man agreed, signaling to the waiter as he emptied the pitcher. "But the mayor is entitled to a defense just like anyone else. Cor illi in genua decidet."

"You can bet it was fear that brought him to his knees. It certainly wasn't prayer." Francis snorted.

Francis Narumba, formerly of one of West Africa's more corrupt, poverty-stricken, and disease-infested republics, had attended Oxford on scholarship, then had been sent to seminary in the United States. Either by his wish or that of a higher power, he had been assigned to minister not to the hellhole of his origins but to Atlanta's growing number of African immigrants.