Storm Front

Chapter 17

Virgil took a call from Hall, at the Law Enforcement Center: “We’ve got a small problem here. Case has decided to cancel your TV show.”

“What?”

“She says she spent two days in a gunnysack, and she looks like it, and she’s not going on TV looking like she does.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Virgil said.

The five minutes eventually cost him four hundred dollars at Macy’s, but he did give her credit for haste: she had no purse, ID, or credit cards, and promised to pay him back. She settled for a couple of cosmetic products and a green summer dress, on sale, and a pair of low heels; and at the last minute went for some underwear, hair spray, and a comb.

On the way back to the Hilton, Virgil said, “Tell me what you think about the kidnappers. Was it the woman I introduced to you? Do you think they’re still around? How organized were they? What’d they talk about? Did they give you any idea of where they were from?”

She said that the female kidnapper was the one in charge. She was tough, and seemed organized, but a little overcooked. Ellen wasn’t sure that it was Tal Zahavi, but thought it might be. “That same kind of executive attitude — if you won’t do it, I will.”

The man, on the other hand, lived in a state of panic: “He seemed more frightened than I was. Looking back, I don’t think they ever planned to hurt me. The guy… he kept asking me if I had to go to the bathroom or needed a glass of water. He was an American, I think, but he used Yiddish slang a couple of times. I think he might have been an American Jew that they called on for help.”

She had no idea of where either of them was from. Whenever the man began to ramble, the woman shut him up, and Ellen had the feeling that she was being pointed at — as in, “Shut up or she’ll hear you.”

The two kidnappers wound up watching a lot of TV, and the woman would go outside to make phone calls. At some point, they contacted her father, and then moved her back to the van and drove around for a while, apparently to exchange her for the stone, but the trade fell through when they saw an airplane tracking her father.

“That was me,” Virgil said. “If I hadn’t been up there, you might’ve gotten loose a day sooner.”

“No way for you to know that,” Ellen said, patting him on the shoulder. “I don’t know how you would have seen them, either — they were hiding in cornfields when Dad went by. They were looking for cars or planes following him, and they saw the plane.”

That evening, after the failure to make the trade, they’d seen Virgil on television, and they’d panicked.

“The woman was raving, she kept saying, ‘What is this? What is this fool doing to me?’ Then the man would say, ‘Looks to me like he’s fucking you, right there on TV.’”

“Then it must have been Tal Zahavi,” Virgil said.

“Well… yeah, I guess it must have been.”

They decided to release her near dawn, because the woman told the man that was when the fewest police officers would be around. When they’d kidnapped her, she’d been wearing a light gardening jacket, with her cell phone in her pocket. They took it away from her, but returned it when they left her in the ditch.

“That was nice,” Virgil said.

“Not so much nice, as scared,” Ellen said. “At that point, they didn’t want anything to happen to me. They wanted me to call the police to come get me. The way they were talking, I’m pretty sure that they’re not around anymore. The guy was saying he was going home, and the woman wasn’t arguing with him. I don’t know for sure if she took off, but I think he did.”

At the Hilton, Virgil bullshitted the manager into giving them a free room for a couple hours, and left Ellen there to clean up.

When she emerged, fifteen minutes before the scheduled press conference, she smiled weakly and said, “At least I feel semi-human again.”

“You look terrific,” Virgil said. She did look okay, although behind the new clothes and makeup, her eyes looked haggard. If it had been Zahavi who’d done the kidnapping, and Virgil was virtually certain that it was, she owed Ellen something serious, because she’d taken away something serious: the sense that there’s a safety and privacy in life, and that bad crazy things happen to other people.

He was inclined to give her a lecture about her father, and about any help she might be giving him, but after glancing at her, decided to let it go.

“You’re going to get a lot of attention now,” he said, as they started down in the elevator. “You will be doing everyone a great favor if you read your old man the riot act.”

“I’m sure he’s still focused on Mother,” she said. “If he’s still alive.”

“That’s a question we’ll have to deal with — that I want to deal with in the press conference,” Virgil said. “You have to make him call me. Or call you.”

The press conference was stacked with reporters. The kidnapping, and the stone, were the big story in the state, and for several states around, and it was beginning to get attention from the national cable channels like CNN and Fox. Both Sewickey and Bauer had been on early morning shows, Virgil had been told, and they had more on their schedule.

The press conference was being held in a meeting room, but they and a couple of Rochester detectives, including Hall, hid out in a conference room until it was time to go out. When it was time, the three cops led Ellen through the meeting room and around to the front, where a podium had been set up. Virgil counted seven cameras, and saw Ruffe Ignace, a Star-Tribune reporter, and sometime friend, taking up two chairs in the front row; not because he needed two chairs, but because he was a two-chair kind of guy, and he didn’t like being touched, as he put it, by TV scum.

Virgil opened the press conference by saying that Ellen Case had been released early that morning, and that the kidnappers had fled, and were being sought by both local police and the FBI. He told them that the kidnappers had attempted to exchange Ellen for the Solomon stone.

He recounted her early-morning phone call, and his call to the Rochester police, and then turned the press conference over to Hall, who told about Rochester cops finding Ms. Case in the Kwik Trip store, about her trip to the hospital, her physical condition, and about the discovery of the motel where she’d been kept.

Hall introduced Ellen to the cameras, and she related how the kidnappers had taken her, how they’d kept her in the motel room, and then how they’d abandoned her on the side of the road.

“I think my father will either see this, or hear this, and Dad, I’m pleading with you, give it up. You’re hurting people now. I can promise you, I’ll never be the same. This whole thing is so crazy. Call Virgil, or call me — I still have my phone. Come in. Please, please, come in.”

She began to tear up, to choke up, at the end of her statement. There were a lot of questions, which she answered, as best she could, and when the reporters began to repeat the questions, Virgil tried to end the conference.

Failed for a few minutes: a TV guy asked, “Is there any indication that this stone itself may be influencing the way Reverend Jones is thinking? Tag Bauer, the well-known archaeologist, says that these artifacts can be extremely psychically powerful and that Reverend Jones may no longer be in control of his own actions. That he may somehow be possessed by it.”

Ignace slapped a hand to his forehead with an audible whap.

Virgil said, “Ah… we think Reverend Jones is quite ill. We do think that he’s in control, however.”

Another reporter asked, “When you briefly had custody of the stone… did you notice any unusual effects from it? Did it glow, was it warmer than it should have been? Did the writing seem unusual in any way? Professor Sewickey said that with artifacts of great power, the writing sometimes changes.”

Ignace turned in his seat and said, “It’s a rock, you fuckin’ moron,” loud enough to be picked up by the microphones.

Virgil said, “No, I didn’t notice anything like that. I’ve got to end this now, because we’ve got a lot of work to do. To reiterate, we need Reverend Jones to call us — either me, or his daughter.”

He stepped back and one of the TV cameramen, a large man in a Sturgis T-shirt, said to Ignace, “You fuck up my tape one more time, and I’ll pull your little fuckin’ head off like a radish out of—”

He didn’t get to finish it, because Ignace — not a tall man, but thick — dropped his notebook and went straight for his throat and the two of them tumbled through a rank of folding chairs amid screaming TV women and fast-moving cameramen still running their machines. The cameraman was on the bottom, and while he was much larger, Virgil saw Ignace land a really terrific right hand to the eye, and then another one, just before the Rochester cops got there and separated them.

Ignace, who as a child had fought in the 152-pound class in the Philadelphia Golden Gloves, gave Virgil a thumbs-up, and Virgil got Ellen and they went out the back door.

Virgil planned to take Ellen to her home in the Cities, partly because it was the right thing to do, and partly because it would give him a lot of time to work on her head, on the chance that she’d tell him where her father was. They’d just started on the way when the day-watch duty officer called and said, “You wanted to know where that iPhone is?”

“Very much.”

“It’s at a McDonald’s at the southeast corner of 14 and 169,” he said. “We just got through the rigmarole with Apple, and we picked it up right away.”

“On the way,” Virgil said.

Ellen, who was sitting beside him, said, “I want to be there when you pick him up. He needs to go to the hospital now, and we need to get this stele out of our hair.”

“Right,” Virgil said. “And maybe he won’t shoot me if you’re there.”

When they got to the McDonald’s, there was no Jones to be found. The duty officer, however, said that he could see the phone location flashing on his computer screen. Virgil found the assistant manager, and asked him to dump the single external trash can. The assistant manager wasn’t happy about it, but he did it, and after a couple of minutes of probing, Virgil came up with the phone.

“So he was here,” he said to Ellen.

“He had a fondness for junk food, and after he got sick, he saw no reason not to eat it,” she said.

“I have a friend who says he hopes that when he gets old, he contracts some painless but fatal disease, so he can get in a couple of years of smoking before he dies. He quit smoking for his health, but still wants them,” Virgil said. “Makes sense to me.”

They were halfway back to Ellen’s place when Jones called, on Virgil’s phone.

“I’d give up the stone in a minute in exchange for Ellen — but since I don’t have to now, I won’t,” he said. “It’ll all be over by tomorrow night, and I’ll turn myself in.”

“They’re going to kill you,” Virgil said, “unless you shoot first and kill somebody else. Is the stone worth killing somebody for? Or dying for?”

“Of course not — and that’s not what’s going to happen. This Tal woman… Did you figure out that it was her?”

“Yeah, we think so,” Virgil said. “We think she might be looking for you.”

“I think she might have been tracking me through that cell phone I had,” Jones said. “I threw it in a trash can at a McDonald’s. You don’t have to bother looking for it.”

“Are you at the hideout now?” Virgil asked.

“No, no, right now I’m out driving around, in case you can track this call. As soon as I’m done, I’ll pop the battery out and go hide where you can’t find me.”

“Man, you gotta—”

“I don’t gotta do anything, except die,” Jones said. “Is Ellen still with you? Could I talk to her?”

“Hang on.”

Virgil gave Ellen the phone, and Ellen shouted at him for a minute or so, and called him an asshole, and asked him where his principles were, and then told him she loved him and they hung up.

“I want you back in the Twin Cities, and I’m going to send somebody to your house to make sure you stay there, and that your old man isn’t hiding out there. I want you somewhere safe.”

“Don’t hurt him,” she said.

When they got to Ellen’s house, Virgil pulled the tracker off her car. She was miffed: “You’ve been tracking me like some kind of criminal?”

“Ellen, you’ve been some kind of criminal. I’ve been overlooking that. Now, go inside, eat something healthy, get some sleep.”

“Tell you what else,” she said. “I’ve got my ex-husband’s .22. I’m going to keep it right by my bed.”

Since he was in the Cities anyway, Virgil called Davenport: “Just wanted to see if you know anything I don’t.”

“All kinds of things, but one is relevant,” Davenport said. “That is, I managed to pry loose another one of those trackers. You want it?”

“Yes.”

“I gotta go out, but it’ll be on my desk.”

Virgil picked up the new GPS unit, bought some candy at the candy machine, talked to the fingerprint specialist about Zahavi’s fingerprints from the gun — they’d gotten no return from anyone — and drove back to Mankato, to his house. He got a bowl of fruit and sprawled on his bed, the better to think about it, since that had worked so well the last time he’d tried it.

Three bidders: the Hezbollah, Tag Bauer, and the Turks. Plus three non-bidders, who were nevertheless pursuers: Tal Zahavi, Sewickey, and Yael Aronov. One outside interest, with unknown involvement: Ma Nobles, who Virgil thought had taken Jones out of the hospital.

The Turks were out of it, so if the deal was going down that night, it had to be with the Hezbollah, or with Bauer. Everybody else was probably out of it — or, at least, nobody else would be invited to attend.

Except, perhaps, Ma Nobles. Where was she in all of this?

Virgil thought about it for a moment, but didn’t have anything to work with: she was an absolute wild card.

So: Bauer and the Hezbollah.

He picked up the phone and called Awad. “Can you talk?”

“I don’t think I will be able to attend tonight — I have a sickness.”

“He’s listening to you?”

“Something I ate… Yes, it’s a bad situation. I will try to do better.”

“Can you sneak out and call me?”

“I think so. It’s only a short-time problem. I will get better.”

“Call as soon as you can,” Virgil said.

Virgil got off the bed and headed downtown, to the Holiday Inn, and knocked on Sewickey’s door. Sewickey didn’t answer, which worried Virgil, given Sewickey’s track record. He went down to the front desk, and the woman there said she’d seen Sewickey on foot, headed across the street toward the Duck Inn.

Virgil found Sewickey sitting on a bar stool, with a beer, talking with the bartender. Virgil got on the next stool down and ordered Heineken, since they didn’t have Leinie’s.

“You got any idea what kind of car Bauer is driving?” Virgil asked.

“Give you one guess,” Sewickey said.

“Don’t make me guess, just tell me,” Virgil said.

“He’s got The Drifter yacht, he’s got The Wanderer airplane, so he’s got to have a…”

The bartender, who’d been listening in, slid the Heineken down to Virgil and asked, “He’s got a yacht, he’s got a plane — can I play?”

“Go ahead,” Sewickey said.

“Gotta be a Range Rover.”

Sewickey pointed a finger at him and said, “Bingo.”

Virgil said, “I was gonna say that.”

“It’s a white Range Rover, the new model, which, if I do say so myself, is still a pig,” Sewickey said.

“Like you wouldn’t want one,” Virgil said.

“I really wouldn’t,” Sewickey said with a semblance of sincerity. “I’d take the Lexus GX if somebody offered me one, but the Caddy is fine. If I could find the right set, I’d like to weld a couple of nice longhorns to the hood, but that’s about the only change I’d like.”

“No itch for a horse trailer?”

“Horses don’t like me,” Sewickey said. “But that’s okay, because I don’t like them back. Though I did have a fairly good horseburger once, in Ljubljana.”

“Fuckin’ French,” the bartender said.

“Ljubljana is in Slovenia,” Sewickey said. “Had some really terrific horseradish mustard with it, too. It was one of those build-your-own horseburgers.”

“Fuckin’ Slovenians.”

Virgil finished his beer and said, “I gotta run.”

“I’ll have another six or eight,” Sewickey said, and the bartender said, “Attaboy.” Sewickey asked, “Any idea of when we’ll know about the stone?”

“Rumor is, the sale takes place tomorrow night, unless somebody is lying to me.”

Virgil went back out into the heat, hitched up his pants, looked both ways, walked back to his truck, and drove to the Downtown Inn, where he saw Bauer’s Range Rover in the parking lot. Sticking the tracker to it was a matter of one minute, and then he was back in the truck.

Where was Awad?

Then Awad called and said, “I am going to the store to get potato chips. But: we must talk, face-to-face. I have found out something most important, for everybody.”

“Tell me.”

“Not on these phones. Who knows who listens?”

“Then let’s meet. Now. I’m not doing anything.”

“This afternoon, I fly. Let us meet at the airport, at four o’clock. You go there first, so if they follow me, they don’t see you arrive. Now, I have to hurry back so I am not suspected. I tell them, ten minutes for these chips and soda water.”

“Four o’clock,” Virgil said. And after Awad was gone, thought, Them?

Virgil sat in the truck for a couple of minutes — nothing to do, really — and thought about Ma. Since he didn’t have anything better to do, and since Ma was the wild card, playing a game he didn’t understand, maybe he could put some pressure on her.

He was about to head out to her farm, when he took a call from Yael Aronov: “I am at this Sam’s Club. You should come here quickly.”

“Jones is there?”

“No, not Jones. Is a woman I know from Israel. She is shopping. I do not know her, exactly, but I recognize her. She is the daughter of Moshe Gefen, who was the most famous paleographer in Israel. This cannot be a coincidence.”

Virgil turned the truck around and headed for Sam’s Club, while Yael explained that a paleographer studied ancient writing.

“So she would have an interest in the stone,” Virgil said.

“Well — I don’t know her, I have only seen her at picnics, but I believe she is involved in high tech. Computer programming. As far as I know, she has no interest in paleography herself.”

“Maybe she’s here for her father — but you said he was the most famous.”

“He died six or seven months ago. Sometime like that. This was a big event in the archaeology circles. He was a winner of the Israel Prize, he was world famous in Jerusalem. But I tell you, if he were still alive, he would be the one chosen to lead the study of the stele.”

“But if she’s not a whatchamacallit, why is she here?” Virgil asked.

“Not for the shopping, I think,” Yael said. “But the answer… we have to ask her.”

Another bidder? Virgil wondered.

The woman’s name was Yuli Gefen, and when Virgil got to Sam’s Club, and managed to badge himself past the bulldog guard at the door, she was not to be found. In fact, he had to call Yael just to find her in the cavernous store.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when they finally got together next to a pallet of generic toilet paper, “I didn’t want her to see me, so I kept hiding, and then, once, I couldn’t find her again.”

“Maybe she saw you,” Virgil said.

“This is possible,” Yael said. She stopped to gaze, apparently awestruck, at the mountain of toilet tissue. Then: “But it’s also possible that she is still here. We could look for a week.”

“So let’s look some more,” Virgil said.

They did, but Gefen was apparently gone.

Virgil called Ellen Case, who answered but said, “I’m not sure I’m talking to you.”

“Things haven’t changed — they’re just as bad as they were,” Virgil said. “I have a question for you. Have you heard the name Moshe Gefen?”

“Moshe? Sure — he’s my father’s oldest friend in Israel. Actually, oldest friend, period. His wife was my mother’s best friend, period. They were. They’re both dead now. They died early.”

“How did they know each other? Your parents and the Gefens?”

“They knew each other forever,” Ellen said. “Dad was in Israel at the time of the 1967 war, they were both students. Dad was studying Hebrew, and Moshe was studying German, which Dad spoke pretty well, so they were teaching each other. Dad had this old Ford that he’d fixed up, and they’d drive all over the country. When the mobilization started for the war, they were way up by Lebanon, and Moshe had to get to his unit, which was all the way down at the other end of the country, near Beersheba. Dad drove him down, but when they got there, his whole unit had already moved south, so Dad drove south toward the Egyptian border…. He had a whole car full of soldiers. Moshe got to his unit — he was wounded a couple of days later — and Dad wound up driving Israeli soldiers all over the place. It was chaos for a while, the way they told it. Then when Moshe got wounded, Dad picked him up at a field hospital and drove him back to Beersheba, to another hospital. They’ve been friends all their lives, Dad and Moshe, Mom and Hannah. Hannah died, let me see, four or five years ago, of a lung disease. Probably from going to too many digs, you know, they breathe in all that dust.”

Virgil said, “Okay.”

“Why?”

Virgil hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Do you know Gefen’s daughter? Yuli?”

“Yuli? Of course. She’s a good friend,” Ellen said. “She dug with us a couple times, when we were there for the summer. How do you know about Yuli?”

“Because she was here this afternoon. Shopping at Sam’s Club.”

Long silence. Then, “Yuli? Really? She never told me.”

“Why would she be here, Ellen?”

“Well…”

“Who was going to get the money from your dad, if he manages to collect it?”

“I don’t know. I thought he’d probably arranged something.”

“That’s what I think,” Virgil said. “I think he arranged it with this Yuli. If you see her, or talk to her, tell her that I’m looking for her. If she tries to leave the country with that money, she better be doing a backstroke across the Rio Grande, because she ain’t getting it out legally. If I catch her—”

“I know, I know, you’ll put her in jail,” Ellen said. “You’re sort of a broken record about that, Virgil. Let me ask this: Why don’t you let it go? Let Dad sell the stone. You’ve got photographs, and you say they’re really good — who cares who gets the stone? Are you going to kill somebody to get it?”

“No, but I’m going to get it,” Virgil said. “I had it, and it was stolen from me by your old man, who damn near burned down my boat. I’m pissed. That stone ain’t going nowhere but in my back pocket.”

“Good-bye, Virgil,” she said, and hung up.

“You have solved the mystery?” Yael asked.

“Yes. Goddamnit, this whole thing is rolling downhill, now. Yuli Gefen is the bagwoman on the deal — Jones gets the money, she takes it out of the country, and Jones dies. Nice, neat, and tidy. And it’s going to happen soon. Or as soon as Gefen gets out of Sam’s Club.”

“What about the stele?”

“Oh, you’ll get the stele,” Virgil said. “I promise you that.”