fixture off, the separation from the ceiling revealing no wires.
He handed the fixture to Templeton and then reached his hand into the hole, feeling the cool air above the ceiling. There seemed to be a good bit of space up there. Jack moved his hand around until he nudged something solid. He closed his hand around it and after a bit of finagling had the staff positioned so he could pull it from the hole. When he was finished and had climbed down from the chair, he saw the old man’s eyes open again. Jack knelt down beside him. The elder’s eyes moved from Jack to the Nehushtan.
“Perhaps Allah did choose you to keep it safe,” the old man said, his voice throaty, fading.
Jack nodded solemnly.
“I’ll certainly try,” he said, but the elder had already passed.
When Jack and Templeton stepped outside, it seemed that the action had waned. What little of it Jack could hear seemed to have moved farther away. Thankful for good timing, Jack started for the jeep, the staff in one hand, the reclaimed gun in the other. Despite the circumstances, he found that his mood had improved and with that altered disposition he found himself harboring no more doubt of a successful escape from the besieged village. He put the staff in the jeep’s open back and, leaning the gun between the seats, reached for the door handle.
He sensed the movement off to his left a second later—a figure in black stepping out of the shadows. Jack saw the man’s gun rising even as he turned, as he tried to snatch up his own weapon that suddenly wasn’t there anymore. He heard the shot, a deafening boom that seemed too near his left ear. He felt his body spasm but knew almost immediately that he hadn’t been hit. He looked down to confirm the fact and then back up where, strangely, he saw the masked soldier swaying drunkenly.
As the man fell to the ground, gone before he finished his descent, Jack turned to see a shaking Martin Templeton. The Englishman was still holding the gun out, as if he would shoot again if the dead man twitched. He was breathing heavily, a wild look in his eyes.
18
“Our phones,” Templeton said.
Jack, who had spent the last thirty minutes guiding the jeep north and away from the doomed village as fast as he was able, looked over at the other man, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s how the Israelis found us,” Templeton explained. “They tracked our phones.”
Jack absorbed that and, eyes back on what was a road in name only, said, “So explain to me why Israelis attacked a Tunisian village in the middle of nowhere. And how you knew who they were.” A pause. “If that’s who they were.”
“Because that’s who hired me to recover the Nehushtan,” Templeton said.
That pronouncement came just as the right front tire of the jeep dipped into a rut that had jumped out from the darkness into the jeep’s path. The jostling sent their few possessions sliding around in the back, and Jack glanced over his shoulder to see that the staff was still secure. That done, he turned his attention back to the Englishman.
“Someone from Israel hired you to find the staff?”
Templeton shook his head. “When I said the Israelis, I meant the Israelis—as in the government. By my understanding, there are elements within their government who are engaged in a cultural mandate of sorts. I suppose you could call it a reclaiming of their history.”
“You mean they’re collecting things that speak to their past.”
“Yes. That’s my understanding,” Templeton said. “And I would say that a staff supposedly used by Moses qualifies.”
Jack turned silent for a moment. What Templeton had told him wasn’t hard to accept. After all, hadn’t the Egyptians been engaged in much the same thing over the last few decades? Reclaiming treasures plundered from them over the centuries? However, to the best of Jack’s knowledge, they hadn’t resorted to sending military units into other countries willing to slaughter people in order to get what they wanted.
“And they are trying to kill us because . . . ?” Jack asked.
“Why do the Israelis do anything they do?” Templeton said dismissively.
Jack aimed an irritated look in his direction.
“My guess is that once I took you prisoner, and once Imolene reported that to our employers, they decided I was not the sort of man they wanted on their payroll,” Templeton said.
“But Imolene is?”
Templeton shrugged. “He does what he’s asked, he does it well,