Storm Front

Chapter 8

The conversation languished on the way back to Mankato. Virgil had put the Beretta into his backseat gun safe, and after a couple of protests, Yael crossed her arms and went into a sulk, refusing to speak to him, even to answer questions.

Finally, Virgil said, “All right, don’t talk. I’m going to see the Texan. You can come if you want, or walk back to your hotel. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

Not a word.

“I’m not giving you the gun back. I’ll send it up to BCA headquarters in St. Paul. If you can get it back from them, or your embassy can get it back, then so be it.”

Not a word.

Not a word until they’d parked at the Holiday Inn, where she got out of the truck and said, “You’re hunting a man who shot two Turks. You don’t carry a gun yourself. You say that when you do, you can’t shoot it. You’re risking both our lives.”

“Jones wasn’t trying to kill anyone,” Virgil said. “In my estimation, you’re more likely to get killed when you carry a gun than when you don’t. Besides, if we run into Jones, I have a feeling that you’d kill him. I don’t think that’s necessary. Not for some rock.”

She stepped back and crossed her arms again, and Virgil sighed and led the way up to Sewickey’s room. When they got to the right door, Virgil lifted a hand to knock, but Yael’s grabbed his wrist before he could, and pulled him back.

“What?”

“Listen.”

She was standing with her ear next to the room’s window, and gestured to it. Virgil put his ear to the glass, and after a second or two, separated out the background noise. What was left was the sounds of vigorous sexual activity, and a woman having a screaming orgasm. And she didn’t stop. And she still didn’t stop.

After a minute of the woman not stopping, Virgil said, “Ah, he’s watching porn.”

“I hope, or this woman is going to explode.”

Yael put her ear back to the glass as Virgil knocked on the door, and three seconds later, she said, “The orgasms have stopped. At least on the TV.”

“That’s because the TV has been turned off,” Virgil said.

“But is Sewickey?” she asked.

Virgil knocked again, and they felt the footfalls of somebody moving inside, then the door opened and a short, thin, black-eyed man, with thinning black hair, peered out over the door chain.

“What?”

Virgil held up his ID. “I’m with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re investigating the theft of a stele from the state of Israel, and a shooting earlier today at a park here in Mankato. We think you can help with that. Could you open the door, please?”

He didn’t open the door. Instead, he asked, “Who got shot?”

“We want to talk about that,” Virgil said. “Could you open the door?”

“This room is my temporary domicile, and as such, you’re not permitted entry unless I give you permission, which I’m not,” Sewickey said.

“Mr. Sewickey, I don’t want to get all lawyerly here, but I have no intention of searching your room, unless I see something illegal the moment I step inside,” Virgil said. “Several crimes have been committed, you were seen speaking to the man who committed them. If you don’t let us in, I will arrest you as a material witness, and have you sent to St. Paul for questioning. That will take several days, to effect the transfer and so on. If you want to spend the next several days in jail, that’s fine. If you don’t, you need to speak to me now.”

“I’m going to call my attorney,” Sewickey said.

“Fine. We will wait out here for ten minutes,” Virgil said. “If it’s any longer than that, I’ll arrest you.”

“I don’t think that’s a reasonable amount of time.”

“I don’t care what you think,” Virgil said. “I don’t have to give you even one minute — I can arrest you now. I don’t want to have to do all that paperwork. We can still avoid that, but you do need to answer some questions.”

Sewickey held Virgil’s eyes for a second, then looked past him at Yael. “Who’s the Jew? Or perhaps, in the circumstances, I should ask, who’s the Egyptian?”

Yael snorted, and Virgil said, “She represents the state of Israel in an effort to recover stolen property.”

“That property belongs to all of mankind,” Sewickey said.

“Yeah, but somebody in mankind has to hold on to it, and in this case, it’s the Israelis,” Virgil said. “Now, time’s a-wastin’. Call your lawyer or not, but I’m putting you on the clock.”

“I’ll be back,” Sewickey said. He closed the door.

Yael said, “I hope there is no other exit.”

Sewickey was back in eight minutes. The chain rattled, and he opened the door and said, “I reserve the right not to answer questions that may be incriminating.”

“You have that right,” Virgil said. Sewickey backed up and Virgil and Yael pushed into the room, which smelled a little funny. Virgil said, “Why don’t you sit on the bed, and Yael and I will take the chairs.”

Sewickey had the tense look of a man who lived with excessive stress. He was perhaps five-eight or — nine, tightly muscled, with gnarled hands and a nose that seemed to be carved from cheese: soft, but with sharp edges. His fingernails, Virgil noticed, were bitten down to the quick, and he seemed constantly to be on the verge of trembling. He was wearing black jeans, a turquoise shirt with a string tie, and pointy black cowboy boots, in crocodile hide.

He sat down and said, “I will tell you that I did speak to the Reverend Jones, and he allowed me to look at the stele.”

“When was this?” Virgil asked.

“Late last night. Very late. I drove here from Austin — how much do you know about me?”

“We read your entry in the wiki,” Virgil said.

“All right. That’s not particularly accurate, but neither is it particularly inaccurate,” Sewickey said. “My age is incorrect. I’m forty-one, not forty-three.”

“Fine,” Virgil said. “I’ll make a note. What did Jones tell you?”

“He told me that he’d found the stele on an archaeological dig, and he fled the country with it because he realized its importance, and because the Israelis were already taking steps to hush up the discovery.”

“This is untrue,” Yael said.

“Whatever,” Sewickey said. “In any case, he said he is dying of metastasized colon cancer, and expects to be dead within the month. I believe he is trying to sell the stele, but I told him I was interested more in documenting its religious and mystical significance, than in actually purchasing it. As long as I know the stone is legitimate, and if I have photos to work from, I will be satisfied.”

“So you’re not a buyer?” Yael asked.

“No, I’m not. I don’t purchase what might be considered by the narrow-minded to be stolen goods,” Sewickey said. “In any case, Reverend Jones allowed me to make a number of photographs of the inscriptions on the stele. He is exceedingly anxious to make sure that the Israelis can’t cover up this momentous discovery.”

“I think he is exceedingly anxious to advertise this object for sale,” Yael said.

Virgil: “Have you made arrangements to meet again?”

“I will have to refuse to answer that on grounds that it might possibly incriminate me,” he said. He frowned. “By the way, who did he shoot?”

“Couple of Turks from downstairs,” Virgil said. “They weren’t hurt too bad — he was shooting snake shot.”

“Perfectly appropriate, if it’s the two Turks I’m thinking of,” Sewickey said. And then, “Have you heard anything about Hezbollah becoming involved in this question?”

“Why would you ask?” Virgil asked.

“So you have,” Sewickey said. He rubbed his chin. “This matter is becoming complicated. We can’t allow either the Turks or the Hezbollah to gain control of this artifact. This thing has tremendous power. This might be the most powerful artifact since the discovery of the True Cross, which discovery I recount in my book, Cross of Christ, Blood of Hope.”

“I hadn’t actually heard that the True Cross had been discovered,” Virgil said.

“Oh, yes, yes, it has,” Sewickey said. “It’s currently being hidden by the Vatican. I had found it sealed in a lead capsule, probably by Constantine’s wife, Saint Helen, thirty feet underwater in the Golden Horn, and had taken it ashore. I was preparing to move it to a safe location when we were hit by a Jesuit commando team, who… Well, it’s all told in my book, which is available on Amazon. Suffice to say, I was lucky to escape with my life.”

“I’ve found that usually does suffice,” Virgil said. “I will tell you, the Jesuits might have let you off easy, but if I find out that you’re hooking up with Jones, I will put your Texan butt in a Minnesota jail. If you see him, hear from him, find out somehow where he’s at — I want to know about it. I’m deathly afraid that somebody’s going to get killed in the hassle over this thing.”

“Somebody probably will,” Sewickey said, his voice gone somber. “The Solomon stone — many people would think its power worth killing for. Beside this rock, an atomic bomb is nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

They talked awhile longer, speculating about Jones’s location and motive; Sewickey’s anxiety increased as they talked, and he looked at his watch several times. Then there was a knock on the door and he got to his feet, stepped to the motel hanger bar, took down a suit coat, and slipped it on.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to call an end to the interview,” he said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

“That wouldn’t be Jones knocking on the door, would it?” Virgil asked.

There was another knock, and Sewickey called, “One second, please.” And to Virgil, “No it wouldn’t.”

“I told you, you should be carrying your gun, or let me have mine,” Yael said.

“Hmm,” Virgil said. He pulled the door open.

And found a man in jeans and a T-shirt, with a large video camera, and a chunky man in a suit with a hairdo that was, compared to most other men’s hairdos, as the Matterhorn is to Bunker Hill; with pink cheeks. He said, “Virgil. Hey man, what’re you doing here?”

“Ah, boy,” Virgil said. To Yael: “It’s Channel Three.”

Yael wanted to watch the interview but Virgil didn’t. He took her down the motel hallway until they were out of earshot of the TV crew, and said, “I’m going to get something to eat. Can you walk back to your hotel?”

“Yes. We are done for the day?”

“I have nothing more to do — I might try to find some of Jones’s hunting and fishing friends, and ask where he likes to camp out. If I find out anything that seems promising, I’ll call you.”

She nodded and turned back to Sewickey’s room, where Sewickey was talking to the TV crew about the best place to set up the interview.

Virgil called the duty officer at the BCA and told him he needed an address for a David Sugarman somewhere in the Mankato area, stopped at the Howlie Inn for a chicken sandwich, got a call back and was told that Sugarman lived across the river in North Mankato. He was, the duty officer said, a mailman.

Virgil crossed the river, found Sugarman’s address, and Sugarman riding a lawn mower in diminishing squares on his half-acre lawn. Virgil flagged him down.

Sugarman was a balding, sweating man in a Hawkeye T-shirt, with a short blond mustache, who could have played a half-dozen different roles in Hollywood movies, just by changing clothes: outlaw biker, truck driver, friendly neighborhood bartender, fat guy on the other side of the fence, the Number Three movie cop who has one line and uses it to crack wise, probably about somebody’s bowel movement or manhood. This version said he hadn’t heard from Jones. “You know he’s dying?” he asked, as he wiped his face on his shirtsleeve.

“I’ve heard that,” Virgil said. “He just shot a couple of guys over in Mankato — didn’t hurt them too bad, but we need to find him. The whole cancer thing, the drugs and pain pills and all, may have pushed him over the edge. We think he could be camping out somewhere.”

Sugarman suggested one riverside camping spot, plus a lakeside hunting cabin in a chunk of woods east of town. “I’d check the cabin first,” he said. “It’s pretty comfortable, there’s nobody around, and it’s out of sight. You can drive right up to it.”

Virgil got directions, and pulled up a satellite view on his iPad, and spotted the cabin exactly. Sugarman said, “You know, to be honest, I wouldn’t help find him, even for a cop, but if he’s shooting people, that’s not the Elijah Jones I know. He’s a good guy, or used to be. Give you the shirt off his back. Take it easy on him.”

Virgil thanked him, got back in his truck, turned around in the street and was headed out when he took a call from an unknown number.

“Is this Agent Flowers?” a woman asked in a husky, strongly accented voice.

“Yes?”

“This is Yael Aronov. I’m in Chicago, and was told I should call you. My plane will arrive in this Minneapolis airport at seven o’clock. I was told to tell you this, that you could find me there and help me to this Mankato.”

Virgil thought about that for a second, rubbed his forehead. “You know, you speak really good English.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I was actually born in Miami Beach, where my parents have a condo.”