“Just do it,” Tyrell said as they started walking. “Anyone who’s a witness is a suspect right now. Then I think that we need to pay a visit to the great pastor himself.”
“If he’s involved in this, he’s not going to just open up,” Lopez pointed out as they walked down the corridor. “And Claretta’s arrest might not be enough to let them drop their guard, whoever they are.”
“We’ll play it as though it’s just a routine questioning,” Tyrell said. “He’s bound to be expecting something along those lines after what’s happened here.”
“If Powell finds out about this, he’ll hit the goddamn roof.”
“Sure he will,” Tyrell agreed. “But if we find the link we need, he’ll be forced to keep the case open. What was the name of that surgeon again?”
JERUSALEM
Byron Stone watched as Malik strode with a casual gait to the glossy black SUV parked by the roadside, opening the rear passenger door and climbing in beside him. The tinted windows gave the world outside a peculiar polarized light. From his vantage point, Stone could see the blocky walls of the Israeli Parliament’s Knesset building glowing in the sunlight.
“Well?” Stone drawled, closing the partition between him and the two MACE operatives, Cooper and Flint, in the front seat.
“The building in which Warner and the woman were hiding was completely destroyed. There are Palestinians on the scene clearing rubble, but we can rest assured that the tunnels beneath have collapsed.”
“What of Rafael?” Stone asked.
“The Palestinians have found one dead Arab in the rubble,” Malik murmured with an unconvincing tone of regret. “Rafael must have been killed in the blast.”
Stone looked out of the windows toward the Knesset.
“One of our two Valkyrie prototypes was shot down,” he hissed furiously. “Warner and the woman must have convinced Israel to help them out of Gaza.”
“The evidence is long gone,” Malik repeated, “buried under tons of rubble, and we have another Valkyrie standing by.”
Stone turned back to face Malik.
“Perhaps the two million dollars it took to build that prototype should come out of your salary then, if it is of such little consequence?”
“The drone proved its capability,” Malik said defensively. “It hit a target in a hostile and densely populated environment with no collateral damage. What do you want me to do about Warner?”
Stone jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the Knesset building outside.
“We’ll go in there and clear up this mess once and for all.”
Rafael sat in cross-legged silence at the corner of a street that looked out across the Knesset, peering through the folds of traditional Bedouin attire that shielded his features from view.
Byron Stone and Spencer Malik strode arrogantly toward the Knesset with their two MACE escorts, showing their papers to the gate guards before being admitted inside. Rafael watched them as contempt seethed like acid through his veins. He looked down into his lap, where a digital camera that had once belonged to the American journalist lay. Rafael watched again the images of the Bedouin man being beaten, looked once more at the images of the strange bones and of the explosive devices in the MACE encampment.
Stone had betrayed him—that much was obvious. The wounds on his body caused by the Valkyrie drone’s blasts served as a constant reminder of it. But what fired Rafael’s rage was that MACE was supplying arms to terrorists in Palestine. The exotic nature of the devices in Ethan Warner’s rucksack left Rafael in no doubt that whatever MACE was up to, it was designed to continue the conflict in Palestine. Profits over peace. Yet that alone was not sufficient reason for their destruction of Ethan Warner’s belongings: the images on the camera, however, might just have been. Rafael was no scientist, but he guessed that whatever the skeleton in the crate was, it was valuable. His mind turned to Bill Griffiths, the fossil hunter hired by Stone a few days before, and the woman with Warner whom he had overheard in the tunnels, speaking of her search for her daughter who had vanished after discovering something in the desert. Griffiths was the man who connected everything, and Rafael knew exactly where to find him.
Rafael turned to the rucksack beside him and opened it, lifting out one of the explosive devices and looking again at Byron Stone’s car as a dark plan began to blossom in his mind. Then he got up and hurried toward the SUV.