“How can you possibly know that?”
Kitsune said slowly, “I can’t prove it, but I believe it to my soul. If you wish, call it intuition.
“I stole the staff of Moses for them, and they tried to kill me. Why? I know you don’t consider my profession to be particularly noble, but there is a code of conduct. They broke it. I could see no reason why, certainly not to save themselves five million euros. I did my job and did it cleanly, no chance of any blowback on them. So why do they want me dead?”
Mike said, “Because you’re a loose thread.”
Kitsune nodded. “Yes, that is true, but surely—”
Adam raised his head. “Why do you believe these sandstorms tie directly into finding the Ark? Do you have any proof?”
“The only thing I have is this. When I was in Turkey, standing around guarding the palace, a woman came for a VIP tour, and with the director of the museum, no less—very unusual. She was tall, fit, blond. I didn’t see her face, nor was I close enough to hear her talk, but she was treated with the utmost respect by the museum’s director. I remember he fell all over himself to get her inside as quickly as possible. I heard she spent most of the time she was there in front of the staff of Moses. She left less than thirty minutes later. The guards were talking about her, how they’d like to get her into bed, you know how men can be. I heard several of them call her hazine avcisi, some sort of professional treasure hunter, but more, they said she was an expert on the Ark of the Covenant. I looked up the visitor records later that night. All references to her being there had been deleted. Gone. Completely.
“I couldn’t ask about it, clearly, but there was something to her visit that felt wrong to me. I never found out who she was. But I know it has something to do with the Ark, perhaps why they’re trying to kill me.
“It’s said it takes one to know one. I think she’s a criminal, a pro, there to check out the staff.”
“Did you see enough to sketch her?”
“I told you, I wasn’t able to see her face. But there was something about her that alarmed me. She must be well connected, probably very rich and powerful, given how the director fawned over her.
“Is she th
e client? I don’t know. You have to help me figure this out.” She drew a deep breath. “But the most important thing is what I heard the man and woman speaking about when I went to the drop site to deliver the staff, what I told you, Nicholas.”
Nicholas drew a small notebook from his jacket pocket and read aloud: “?‘I wish I could see it, the Gobi sands—a tsunami sweeping over Beijing.’ ‘We will see it all on video. All the sand . . . Could Grandfather be that good?’ ‘You know he is. And we will see the aftermath . . . leave in three days after things . . . imagine, we are the ones to drain the Gobi?’?”
Nicholas looked at Kitsune. “And you believe they drained the Gobi to find the Ark of the Covenant?”
“Well, they already have the staff of Moses,” Kitsune said. “But you see, as I said, the staff is supposed to be inside the Ark of the Covenant. So what does it mean?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Adam thought about it. Build the code himself, encrypt it, and build a special back door so the Italians would never know he’d broken into their CCTV feed for Piazza San Marco? He knew they’d be able to identify the shooters, and maybe connect them to Kitsune’s client. Or, turn to Istanbul and find the blonde? Adam knew she had to be the key. He heard Kitsune say, “It was certainly a man and a woman speaking about the storm in the Gobi. Now that I think about it, their voices sounded young.”
Adam went on the DarkNet. Here, he was Dark Leaf. His former name, Eternal Patrol, had been well buried when he’d come on board with the FBI. He and Nicholas had regularly pulled white-hat jobs together to establish the credentials of the new hacker name on the block. Dark Leaf was a dissident, a hacker with multiple website takedowns and proxy raids, and now a popular member of the online world of anonymous. As a result, Dark Leaf had a growing reputation and was known in all the wrong circles. No one would ever guess it was all a fabrication.
A message window opened, four other hackers popped up and greeted him in their own special language.
Hellop!
Foo?
WYB?
Adam started to type, using his own peculiar hacking shorthand, not Dark Leaf, simply DL. Were someone to look over his shoulder, they’d see what at first glance looked like nonsense, strings of letters and characters and numbers. But to Adam, this was his world, the place he was most comfortable.
The conversation was general for a few minutes, catch-ups and bragging, then he singled out a hacker named Ham for a private-messaging session. The window opened on the top right, yellow words on a black background, graying out the rest of his screen.
DL: Has anyone had contact with GR8T lately?
Ham: He went to join ISIS.
DL: Please, that’s not true.
Ham: Of course not, haha. Last I heard he was still in Constantinople. But flaky.
DL: I need a pipe in. Can you help?