have liked. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was only able to track it back to about 200 AD. Before that, there’s no record at all. At least none that I could find.”
Marwen thought about that as he took a long pull on his cigar.
“But what made you begin looking for it in the first place?” he asked. “If the Bible says it was destroyed, why search for it?”
It was a question Jack would have been happy leaving unanswered, because to tell the truth meant admitting to dumb luck—a commodity with which he was intimately familiar. Giving Marwen the answer he wanted meant telling him that he’d been searching for something else entirely and that only the accidental reading of the wrong book—he’d reached for a different tome and hadn’t realized he’d grabbed the wrong one—had set him on the Nehushtan’s path.
“Let’s just say that sometimes archaeology involves being open to opportunities when they present themselves,” he said.
Marwen fixed him with a look that told the American he knew obfuscation when he saw it, but he let it pass—a gesture that Jack was grateful for.
“I can get you a car,” Marwen said. “Or I can arrange transport anywhere you wish. There are several towns much larger than Medenine that would offer you the opportunity to leave the country. You could likely purchase transport out in either Gabès or Shkira, although I would recommend Sfax. It’s larger. And I have friends in the shipping industry.”
The thought of being packed up in a box and shipped somewhere made Jack smile, until he wondered if that was so far from the truth of his situation. Once again he lamented his inability to call someone like Duckey, who would have the whole thing figured out for him within an hour. Even talking with Romero or Espy would have been helpful, if only to improve his mood.
As he thought of Espy, he couldn’t help wondering what she’d done once he missed his flight to Caracas. If he were Espy, he knew what he would do: nothing. Jack knew that his years of being unable to keep a schedule, of eschewing the appearance of permanence, and in all other ways avoiding responsibility had left him in a position in which he could have probably gone missing for a month without anyone noticing.
On most days he would have found a thought like that amusing. At the moment, though, as he thought of how far away he was from Espy—in a relationship sense as well as in physical proximity—he found his mood growing even darker. For quite a while he’d known that she was dissatisfied with what he’d offered her. And she had every right to be, considering what they’d gone through together. He’d even suspected that she was coming close to ending things.
Had someone said that to him only a week ago, he would have returned with some flippant response, some statement filled with bravado. Now, as he sat in his friend’s house in Tunisia, he felt completely different—about everything.
He missed her greatly. He only hoped he would get the opportunity to let her know.
The real problem, as Duckey saw it, was trying to hide in a city where he stuck out like a sore thumb.
He’d spent the night in an Al Bayda hotel several blocks away from the one he’d run from and had exhausted a good portion of his cash to secure the room. He could not chance using a credit card, knowing that, even though the domestic surveillance infrastructure in the country was woefully behind compared to the technology and tactics employed by his own government, it would not take them long to track his credit card use. They would have been at the door of his hotel before he’d finished brushing his teeth.
And so he’d paid in cash, said little, and slept in his clothes, and when he awoke the next morning, it had been with the understanding that the quality of his sleep had left something to be desired. With the sun rising enough for him to see the street, he slid the shade aside and watched for several minutes, looking for any car that passed more than once, or a parked vehicle that looked as if it didn’t belong. But he saw nothing out of place and decided to take a shower.
Since the hotel didn’t see the need to supply a private shower, Duckey padded down the hall and entered the communal bathroom, grateful that the shower area had been separated