The Sinai Secret

TWENTY-SIX

Middle Temple Inn

Fleet Street

London

1022 Hours

Two Days Later

Lang was still red-eyed from lack of sleep. Even multiple drinks and the made-up beds into which the first-class seats had been transformed had not cured his aircraft- induced insomnia. Arriving at Gatwick Airport along with the dawn, he had randomly chosen a taxi rather than picking one up at the hack stand. He wanted no replay of Brussels.

The cab dutifully deposited him at the Stafford, a small hotel on a cul-de-sac in St. James's. He was in time for an ample breakfast in a lobby that resembled a parlor Queen Victoria might have visited.

A telephone call, shower, and change of clothes later, he had decided to enjoy the sights of London on foot. Grossing in front of Buckingham Palace, he strode across St. James's Park and Horse Guards to Trafalgar Square, where he paused, ostensibly watching pigeons and traffic swirl around Nelson's Column, an activity that gave him reason to look around like any gawking tourist should anyone be following him.

No one showed him any particular interest.

A short walk down the Strand, past the Savoy, and he stopped again, this time looking at the playbill posted by the theater in front of the hotel. If Lang were being followed, he was unable to detect it.

A block or so farther along was a brief section of old Roman wall that marked where the city of Whitehall ended and the city of London began. It also marked the place where the Strand became Fleet Street, once the center of the city's newspaper and publishing industry, enterprises long ago farmed out to the suburbs, former colonies, or anyplace where labor unions had little sway.

In the twelfth century, the Knights Templar had had a temple here. A short, unmarked path led from the street to what remained of it. Just past that was the ant hill-like Temple Bar, home to most of London's barristers. They located here because of its proximity to the Old Bailey, for centuries past the site of the principal criminal courts.

Lang trudged up a flight of stairs, pausing to flatten himself against the stone wall to make way for a distraught young lady in heels, a black gown, a starched white split dickey, and with a white periwig held atop blond curls by the hand that didn't have the briefcase in it. She gave Lang a baleful stare, muttered something that might have been, "Thanks," and hurriedly clattered on her way down.

Being late for court apparently was just as uncomfortable here as in the United States.

About halfway down a dingy hall, Lang stopped in front of a door bearing a plaque that announced, j. annueliwitz, barrister. There was no bell, so Lang knocked.

"Enter," came a voice from the other side just before the sound of an electric bolt sliding back.

Once he was inside the door swung shut, the only sound being that of the lock returning to its place. J. Annueliwitz, barrister, like Lang, had old habits that died hard.

Lang stepped into what could have been the wake of a tornado: Papers were piled, not stacked, on every flat surface, including the floor. An occasional leather book cover peeked out from the debris. Roughly down the middle of the room a path had been cleared, and in the middle of it stood an older man.

"Lang Reilly," he observed, pushing spectacles back up on his nose. "You must be sorely oppressed to come to me for help."

Lang returned the ensuing bear hug as best he could. "Aren't most of the people who come in here?"

The man stepped back as though to inspect his visitor. A fringe of white hair encircled an otherwise pink scalp. "Oppressed or lost."

He was wearing a starched white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Part of it hung outside gray trousers held up by bright red suspenders. Turning, he led Lang into a tiny inner office that was, if possible, more littered than the room they had left. Like icebergs, a computer monitor and rack of briar pipes on the desk towered above an arctic sea of paper.

Jacob Annueliwitz surveyed one of two Naugahyde chairs before stooping and gathering up a file folder, spilling its entrails onto the floor. "Sit, sit." He retreated behind the desk. "Sit and tell me your life's story since I saw you last. Is Gurt well?"

The unintentional wounds are the most painful, Lang thought as he gingerly sat. "Don't know. She left me almost a year ago."

"Can't say I blame her, nice girl that she is." He was reaching for a pipe. "And such a bounder you are."

Lang watched the pipe being packed with tobacco from a leather pouch. "I thought Rachel had finally gotten you to quit."

He nodded as he struck a wooden match. "And so she has… at home, at least. That's why I still have this wretched office: to have a place where I can enjoy a pipe or two in relative calm."

Calm was hardly this man's life story. Born to Holocaust survivors in Poland, he and his family emigrated to the new state of Israel after the war. As a young adult Jacob had come to university at Oxford after his obligatory military service. For reasons known only to him, he had preferred the dank English climate to the Mediterranean sun of Palestine and had become a citizen, then studied law. His new citizenship did not deprive him of his Israeli one, and he had been contracted by Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, to keep an eye on Arab embassies and diplomats.

Both MI5 and the resident CIA had been aware of his activities and, if not approving, did little to interfere. After millennia of shifting attitudes toward them, the Jews felt compelled to spy evenhandedly on friend and foe alike. What had not been so widely known was Jacob's expertise-some said artistry-with explosives, learned during his time in the Israeli army. He was the nuncio of nitrates, the pundit of plastique, a technician of T4.

He and Lang had met while Lang was briefly assigned to the Agency's London office and had become fast friends, a relationship further cemented when each had had a chance to save the other's life.

Lang inhaled deeply before the blue cloud of foul- smelling tobacco smoke reached where he was sitting. "Does Rachel know you still smoke here?"

Jacob took the pipe out of his mouth long enough to survey the bowl. "As you know, the source of all law lies in its enforceability. I think Locke made that observation."

"He probably didn't have a wife who wanted him to quit smoking."

"Quite likely. Now, what, besides my scintillating wit and brilliant powers of observation, brings you here? Or, in the vulgate, what crack have you gotten your arse into now?"

Jacob listened without interruption, poking and prodding his pipe with what looked like a nail. When Lang finished, Jacob made a sucking noise on the pipe before tapping it against an already overflowing ashtray.

"Bloody hell! I'm sorry to hear about Professor Lewis. Seemed a nice chap. For a goy, anyway. Handled a really nasty divorce for him. He wanted to get as far away from his ex as possible. Atlanta was as distant as I could do for him."

Lang didn't reply.

Jacob extended a hand across the desk. "These Hebrew writings, you think they may contain clues as to who is after what?"

They're one of those stones I'd hate to leave unturned."

"I suppose you want me to translate them for you."

"You bragged you could read the language."

"No brag, lad. I can and do." He moved his fingers in a give-it-here gesture. "Let's see."

Lang reached into his coat pocket and produced them. "You understand those are only copies. The originals are somewhere in Austria."

Jacob was pushing his glasses up again. "I'll bear that in mind if it becomes bloody relevant." He looked up. "What's your stake in this, anyway?"

"Somebody tried to kill me, remember?"

Jacob was sucking on an empty pipe. "Happens daily to someone in your country, if what I see on the telly is correct."

"This wasn't in the U.S.; it was in Brussels and Amsterdam."

Jacob looked up. "I can see why any number of blokes would be interested in the process of making gold, if that's what your two murdered scientists were really doing. I'm a bit at a loss as to what an ancient manuscript would have to do with it."

"That's what I hope to find out."

Jacob was inspecting the copies carefully, as though they might contain something toxic.

"Quite thick for a truly old manuscript," Jacob muttered, running his free hand across a shiny scalp. "Not something I can do in an hour or two. Have to consult references and the like." He made a vague motion toward the debris of his outer office.

"I don't think I'm in a rush."

Jacob put the papers down and produced a cell phone. "Excellent! I'll ring up Rachel and tell her to put a little more water in dinner's soup."

Lang felt a jolt of near panic.

In the tight intelligence community, Rachel Annueliwitz had been famous as the world's worst cook. Excuses to avoid her dinner parties were as creative as they were varied. Some merited Pulitzer prizes for fiction. The last time Lang had been cornered into eating one of her concoctions had been over two years ago, and he still could not decide whether it had burned most going in or out. Either way, he had been reduced to a state of flatulence that would have rivaled a Greyhound bus for emissions.

"You were kind enough to feed me last time."

"Loaned you the Morris, too," Jacob added, referring to the diminutive automobile he had driven as long as Lang had known him. "So what?"

"Last time I didn't exactly feel free to be seen in public. Seems only fair that Rachel not have the burden of feeding me again. Let me take you both out."

Jacob had put the phone down and was using the naillike thing to scrape the bowl of his pipe, producing a crunching sound. "Fair? What else does the woman have to do? Besides, I'll bet you eat only takeaway, haven't had a good home-cooked meal in a bit."

And not likely to have one tonight, Lang thought. Not only is love blind; it has no taste buds. the prospects were bleak either way. The average London pub or restaurant provided only marginally better fare, usually featuring stringy beef burned beyond recognition and vegetables so thoroughly boiled that they offered little color and less taste. Lang had a theory that this small island had established an empire and dominated the world because the Drakes and Hawkinses, the Wellingtons and Nelsons, the Churchills became morally and mentally tough by enduring English cooking, second only to Aleut Eskimo whale blubber as the worst cuisine in the world. A man who could enjoy steak-and-kidney pie was unlikely to flinch at an enemy broadside. Faced with eating Yorkshire pudding or charging emplaced cannon, who would not choose the guns? The onslaught of the Luftwaffe was nothing compared to a lifetime of blanched peas.

Waterloo was not won on the playing fields of Eton. It was won at the English dinner table.

The quality of British food, or lack thereof, was the reason Chinese and Indian establishments flourished in London. In the last few years one or two French eateries had opened, with great success.

Lang had an inspiration. "Why don't we try Mirabelle's?" Although the food wasn't a whole lot better than the city's dismal average, the checks were astronomical. The theory, Lang guessed, was, Who was going to complain about a dinner that cost more than Great Britain's average weekly salary? "It'll give Rachel a chance to put on some nice clothes."

Jacob grinned, agreeing. "The bird does like to tart up a bit. You'll stop by for a tot or so before dinner?"

Lang tried not to show his relief as he assented.

That evening Lang took the tube's Waterloo Line to St. George's Circle at South Dock, where contemporary high-rises peered at Westminster and the Houses of Parliament across the Thames. Since the addition to the skyline of the London Eye, a huge Ferris wheel along the Embankment, the view was different, perhaps slightly disconcertingly so, from the one Lang had known. The subway, or "tube," had its own amusement system of aspiring musicians, singers, jugglers, and magicians. Lang paused a few minutes at his stop to see an attractive young lady contort her body into what he had thought were anatomically impossible positions before dropping a pound coin into her bowl and heading up the stairs.

Once on the surface, he walked a few blocks to Lambeth Road. Ahead of him were the massive naval guns that marked the Imperial War Museum. He turned left and entered the foyer of a glass-and-steel tower indistinguishable from its neighbors.

The Annueliwitz living quarters were nothing like Jacob's office. Chrome and glass furniture threatened to be a great deal less comfortable than it was. Several pieces of modern sculpture displayed on acrylic stands looked as though they had been machine parts in a former life. On the walls were squares of earth-toned canvas that could have come from a military shelter, each a testament to the gullibility of collectors of modern art.

If monochromatic cloth qualified as art.

Rachel met him with a hug and a kiss that smelled of gin. "Langford! How delightful to see you again!" She pressed a frosted stem glass into his hand. "A very dry martini! See, I remembered!"

Lang was reasonably certain he had had his customary single-malt last time. He had quit martinis ever since Dawn, his wife, had described them as "silver mumblers- have two and you're mumbling."

He accepted the drink as gracefully as possible, looking for a potted plant that might surreptitiously enjoy it more than he. Or at least not show the consequences of imbibing straight alcohol. "Rachel! You have not aged a day. And am I mistaken or have you lost a few pounds?"

Neither was remotely true, but one of the very few things Lang had learned about women was that those two phrases were always appreciated. Actually, losing weight was the last thing Rachel needed to do. He had often thought that if she turned sideways, she would present no shadow. He supposed she maintained that figure to enjoy the miniskirts she favored, one of which she was wearing tonight. With blunt-cut hair the color of midnight and a face Lang was certain had put at least one plastic surgeon's children through college, she could have passed for Jacob's daughter.

"Only pounds she's lost is at sodding Fortum and Mason." Jacob grumbled as he entered from the bedroom.

Lang noticed he had a glass of Scotch.

Rachel whirled away toward the kitchen. She did not walk; step, or move by any mundane means; she danced, tiptoed, pirouetted, or spun. Lang supposed a ballet teacher had also been enriched by knowing her.

"Oh, I have some very special hors d'oeuvres I made just for you," she called over a shoulder.

A potted plant was now a necessity.

Seeing none, Lang stepped over to the sliding glass doors, opened them, and stepped onto the narrow ledge that Jacob generously referred to as a balcony. The last time Lang had been out here he had been hanging underneath by his fingertips.

"Do you mind?" he called inside. "It's a pleasant night, and your view of Westminster is the best in the city."

The darkness permitted him to jettison both martini and the hors d'oeuvre Rachel insisted he sample. He feigned sipping at an empty glass until Jacob announced it was time to leave for the restaurant.

All three shoehorned into the Morris, Lang soon regretted his gallantry in insisting on riding in the car's mere symbol of a backseat.

"Bloody hell!" Jacob growled. "I left my bleedin' wallet in my office!"

"No problem," Lang said, feeling as if he were speaking between his knees. "It's my treat, anyway."

"You'll not want to pick up the chit if I get stopped by some sodding copper wanting driver's permit and insurance card."

"The Middle Temple Inn isn't so far out of the way," Rachel soothed.

"No, but parking's a problem, and driving round the block's a bother with the one-way streets. You two'll have to sit in the car while I dash in."

Although one way, Fleet Street wasn't wide enough to accommodate curbside parking. A blare of horns from usually polite Londoners when Jacob stopped made it clear another plan was in order.

Lang resisted the temptation to remind his friend that he had suggested the tube.

Jacob sighed in resignation. "There's a car park a block over."

Lang and Rachel made listless efforts to make conversation before becoming quiet.

After what Lang guessed would be ten minutes, she stirred. "Shouldn't take him this long to find his wallet."

"Have you seen his office lately?"

She chuckled. "Heavens, no! Last time I went in there I was afraid something would fall on me. Besides, the dear man guards the place as if it were top-secret. It's his exclusive domain."

Ten minutes later Lang squeezed out of the car. "Exclusive domain or not, I think I'd best see what's taking so long."

Rachel pulled the key out of the ignition. "I'll come along."

The old Templar temple was dark, the surrounding grounds more shadow than light. Only one or two office windows were illuminated. A single bulb on each landing showed the way upstairs. English barristers did not work the hours of their American counterparts.

The dimness of the second floor made the light from under Jacob's door all the more visible. Lang was reaching for the knob when he stopped. The voice he had just heard was not Jacob's.

Using one hand to put a finger to his lips, he used the other to gently push Rachel against the wall before putting an ear against the wood of the door. It gave slightly. Whoever had last entered hadn't pulled it completely shut.

Lang tried to recall whether the hinges had squeaked that afternoon.

He pushed it open only wide enough to put his face to the crack. Jacob was facing him, speaking to a man whose back was toward Lang, From Jacob's expression, the visitor was no friend.

"Again," Jacob said, "I have no bloody idea what you're talking about. You've jolly well tossed the office and haven't found whatever you're looking for…"

The man said something Lang couldn't hear and gestured with a gun in his hand.

Then Jacob saw Lang. Or at least, Lang thought he did. Not wanting to alert the intruder, he had given only the slightest twitch of an eye.

Lang shifted slightly, trying to see as much of the room as possible. His choice of action was going to vary if there was another person in the office.

"What…?" Rachel asked.

Lang made a hushing motion.

"Look," Jacob was saying. "You've simply made a mistake. Since it's only you, why don't you-"

He had answered Lang's question.

Jacob stepped forward. His visitor's reaction was a step backward to keep the space between them. The man motioned menacingly with his weapon. He wasn't going to retreat farther. This was as close to the door as he was going to get.

Something-a slight groan of the floorboards, a puff of air from the opening door-gave Lang away before he had reached his adversary. The man had been trained. Instead of the normal reaction of spinning around and exposing his back to Jacob, he attempted to sidestep before turning.

But not in time.

With his left hand Lang got under the other man's gun arm, shoving it upward as he cupped his chin in his right hand and simultaneously brought up a swift knee to the groin. His opponent grunted with pain and doubled over in time to take a second knee to the face.

Blood from the broken nose made abstract patterns on the papers scattered on the floor.

The two blows had taken sufficient strength from the intruder that Jacob easily wrested the gun from his hand. Before he could bring it to bear, the interloper was out the door, a bloody hand holding his crushed face. Jacob stepped outside and leveled what Lang could now see was a massive weapon.

"Jacob, dear, be more careful where you point that thing." Rachel stood between her husband and the sound of rapidly receding footsteps. "Whatever did you do to that poor man?"

Lang crossed the room and took the pistol from Jacob as he lowered it. "IMI Desert Eagle."

Jacob nodded. "Fifty-caliber Magnum, the one designed in America and developed by the Israeli military. Bit of a cannon, that."

Lang turned the heavy automatic over. Only seven shots in the fifty-caliber version. Short on firepower, too large and heavy for most who simply needed a firearm, but more easily concealed than a carbine with similar hitting force-no amateur's gun. The Desert Eagle's cavernous bore inflicted "magnum flinch" on those not used to its mule kick of a recoil.

"Whoever your visitor was, he was a professional. What did he want?"

"Thanks to you, we never got specific: He just wanted to know where 'it' was."

" 'It'?"

"Don't think I misunderstood. That's what the bloke said, 'it.'"

Rachel crossed the room, taking the heavy automatic from Lang. She carried it into Jacob's office with two fingers in much the same way she might have disposed of a dead rat. "Gentlemen, our dinner reservations won't wait all evening."

The woman was a seasoned intelligence operative's wife. But the look she gave her husband clearly said the interrogation would begin when they were alone.

Once they were all back in the car, Lang's mind went over the last two days. Rather than risk his reservations appearing on an airline's easily hacked computer, he had shown up at the airport and paid cash for the ticket, thereby also avoiding a credit card's all too traceable charge, if guaranteeing a thorough search of him and his single suitcase by zealous airport security.

He would, of course, be on the aircraft's manifest.

The fact that he had been traced to London and followed to Jacob's office meant several things, all unsettling. First, whoever was out to end the alternate-fuel program probably had contacts in the United States. That was hardly surprising in view of the shots fired in Underground and Lewis's murder. Second, this unknown entity was well organized, able to gain information on one side of the Atlantic and use it on the other. He had surmised that if not known it.

The gun he had just held, though, told him something new: This… this unknown was composed of at least some professionals, trained men, as opposed to a band of wild fanatics. To leave such a clue was a surprise. Anonymous groups involved in violence usually took pains to use sanitized equipment, weapons like the Russian AK-47 and its progeny, the U.S. Colt. 45 automatic, or any of several Berettas, firearms of such universal use that they were no longer attributable to any particular location, country, or organization.

Either someone had gotten careless, or whomever he was opposing didn't worry about leaving clues.

He spent most of dinner trying to figure out which.