Panacea

  “I can tell you no more,” Ix’chel said. “I fear I have told you too much already.”

  Without another word or a look back, she ran off.

  Laura’s initial impulse was to follow her, but she saw no upside to that. Ix’chel was fleeing to the safety of her people.

  Back at the Jeep, she found Rick waiting for her. She gave him a quick summary of what had gone down with Ix’chel.

  She sighed. “But all in all I’ve got a feeling I was wasting my time. I don’t think her position for Polaris was right. Too low…”

  “Lower than when you were growing up in Utah?” Rick said. “Yeah, it would be. The farther north you go, the higher it gets, until you reach the North Pole where it’s directly overhead. Move south and it gets lower and lower. Cross the equator and you can’t see it at all unless you’re on a mountain.”

  “You’re just a font of knowledge, aren’t you. Would you happen to have a map of the world handy as well?”

  “Sorry. Just Mexico. There’s always Google Maps, but I can’t access that without an Internet connection.”

  She had the sat phone, but the screen was too small to be of much use. She noticed Rick pulling a gizmo from his pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  “GPS. I want to pinpoint this location for future reference so we can run an azimuth through it and see where it takes us.”

  “Right. Then we get an azimuth from Chaim’s tattoo and see where they intersect. Hopefully at this Wound, whatever it is.”

  I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about.

  “I guess that means we head back to New York.”

  Back to New York … She couldn’t wait.

  “Uh-huh. Williamsburg, here we come.”

  6

  On the drive from the village, Laura had the wheel again. As they neared the exit for the Chetumal airport on Route 186, Rick pointed to a sign indicating Av Insurgentes off to the left.

  “That looks like the main drag. See if we can find an office supply place.”

  “What for?”

  “Need a protractor, remember?”

  Since neither of them had been able to figure out how to trace the azimuth on Google Maps, they’d decided on the retro route.

  Not only was Avenida Insurgentes indeed the main drag, but they hadn’t gone a mile before Laura spotted a familiar red-and-white sign.

  She had to laugh. “Office Depot. I don’t believe it.”

  She stayed with the Jeep—the broken rear window meant it couldn’t be left unattended—while Rick ran inside. He emerged ten minutes later with a flimsy plastic bag, grinning like a little kid.

  “Got us a protractor—a three-hundred-sixty-degree model—a ruler, world map, pens, and pencils. We’re all set.”

  Half an hour later they were in the waiting area for the charter service that would fly them back to Cancún. Rick had filled out forms for the damage to the Jeep, blaming it on an attempted carjacking by a gang of teens. While their charter was being readied, Rick spread the map out on a chair.

  “Here’s approximately where we were,” he said, checking his GPS and making a dot with a red Sharpie. “The longitude lines all go to true north, so if we line up with the nearest and plot your readings…”

  He placed the circular protractor on the page and made dots at the 72- and 252-degree lines. Then he took the ruler and drew a line that connected both through the village dot. As she’d known, heading west-southwest the line passed through Campeche, Guatemala, Chiapas, and into the Pacific.

  “Continuing it westward,” Laura said, “there’s nothing but ocean until you hit Australia.”

  “Let’s go the other way.”

  He continued the line east-northeast from the village and Laura watched with dismay as it ran through Cuba, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, the Ukraine, and all across Russia.

  Rick grunted. “Thought this would narrow the field but I guess not.”

  Her feelings exactly.

  “Ix’chel said the seeds are usually postmarked from different spots in Europe, so I think that’s the direction we should be looking.”

  She’d pulled the photo of Chaim’s tattoo from her bag when they dropped off the Jeep. She laid that on the map.

  “See? His transecting line runs the other way.”

  Rick laid the protractor on it and got a quick reading.

  “Roughly one twelve, one thirteen degrees southeast.”

  “Just for fun, draw a line from New York at that angle.”

  He did. Chaim’s line intersected Ix’chel’s in the middle of the Atlantic.

  “Well, there goes that theory,” Rick said.

  “What theory?”

  “That the lines all cross at the … what was it?”

  “The Wound.”

  “Right. The Wound. Well, unless the Wound is the sunken city of Atlantis—”

  “Oh, no … please, let’s not start with that.”

  “Not starting anything, but unless the Wound in is the middle of a watery nowhere, we need a new theory. And exactly why do we want to find this?”

  “Maybe we can find a dose of ikhar there.” When Rick gave her a puzzled look, she added, “That’s Ix’chel’s term for Stahlman’s panacea.”

  Laura was running a quick mental review of all that Ix’chel had told her and thought she’d found their error.

  “We may be operating on a false premise,” she said. “The sylyk—that’s what healers like Ix’chel and Chaim are called—have to say the prayer at the place of their birth during the autumnal equinox. Get it? The place of their birth. We’re assuming Chaim was born in Williamsburg.”

  Rick’s mouth took on an annoyed twist. “Of course. GIGO.”

  “What?”

  “G-i-g-o. Old computer acronym for ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ Any calculation is only as accurate as the data entered. Verify data first and then calculate.” He looked at Laura. “How do we find out?”

  “I make a call.”

  He shook his head. “Imagine how many Brodys live in Williamsburg.”

  “Lots, but the ME’s office dealt with his family. I just have to call my office.”

  She just hoped the family had filled in the place-of-birth blank. Otherwise, she’d have to call the Brody house.

  But lucky for her, his mother had written Gan Yosaif, Israel, in the blank. Laura requested a PDF of the page be emailed to her.

  “Israel?” Rick said when she told him. “Whoa. Wasn’t expecting that. Sounds like a kibbutz.”

  “Kibbutz … isn’t that some sort of communal farm?”

  “You got it.”

  “How do you know it’s a kibbutz? Is it famous?”

  “Never heard of it, but Gan Yosaif translates to ‘Joseph’s Garden’—sounds like a vegan restaurant but it’s a typical kibbutz name.”

  “Funny … you don’t look Jewish.”

  “I’m not. Just know a little Hebrew.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Just do. Let’s get a ballpark on Chaim’s azimuth from Israel.”

  Laura watched him start to draw a line on the map, but all she could think of was how the mystery man she was traveling with didn’t know Spanish but did know Hebrew. Weirder and weirder.

  “Not going to bother with the southeast azimuth. You can see that’s going to hit Jordan and Saudi Arabia and on toward southern India. Low yield there. But the other direction…”

  The line running 293 degrees northwest sliced through the toe of Italy’s boot and straight through the Pyrenees, south of Toulouse.

  Something clicked in Laura’s brain when she saw that. She jabbed her finger onto southern France.

  “There! That’s the place!”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Ix’chel said her cult, her Children of the All-Mother, has been around for thousands of years. And Stahlman said they might be an offshoot of the old druids.”

  “So?”

  “That used to be
Gaul, a hotbed of pagans before the Dark Ages.”

  “And you just happen to know this how?”

  “Tell me how you know Hebrew and I’ll tell you how I know about pagans in Gaul.”

  He shook his head, his expression annoyed. “We’re going to decide the next stop on this trip based on what you’re saying here. Let’s not play games.”

  He was right, damn him.

  “Okay, I took four years of Latin in high school. We spent sophomore year translating Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. He talks about the Gauls being pagans and I think he mentioned one or two of their deities.”

  God, she could still remember the first line: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Some things never left you.

  “Caesar called them ‘pagans,’ huh?” Rick laughed and shook his head. “A polytheist pot calling a pantheist kettle black. Gotta love it.” He looked up at her. “Next stop Tel Aviv?”

  Her throat tightened. Her heart had been set on returning to New York and seeing Marissa. But she’d promised Stahlman two weeks. Twelve more days to go …

  “Why Israel?” she said. “Why not go straight to … Gaul?”

  “Because ‘Gaul,’ as you put it, is big.”

  “But we’ve got a line going—”

  “Israel is not big—about the size of New Jersey—but it stretches a whole two hundred fifty miles north to south. If I run the same azimuth from the two ends of the country”—he traced a finger back and forth across the map—“the path could take us north of the Pyrenees and place us in France, or south of them into Spain. Two different countries. We need to find Gan Yosaif and establish a pinpoint GPS locus for it, then go high-tech and recalculate both azimuths as accurately as possible.” He raised his eyebrows. “So, I repeat: next stop Tel Aviv?”

  She sighed. “I suppose so.”

  Williamsburg, here we come had morphed into Promised Land, here we come.

  7

  As Nelson admitted Bradsher to his suite, he knew immediately from his expression that he was not bringing good news.

  “Is this about the Fanning woman?”

  “Afraid so, sir.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She and her bodyguard just used Stahlman’s credit card to rent a charter out of Chetumal.”

  Nelson felt a ball of ice form in his chest. That meant she’d left the village and driven all the way to the coast, and no word from Miguel in all the time she had been on the road. Unless …

  “Did Brother Miguel call and you not tell me?”

  “No, sir. Not a word from Miguel. And I’ve called him at least a dozen times since I got word of the charter, but he’s not answering.”

  Nelson didn’t have to say it, and Bradsher obviously felt no need either. They both knew Miguel and his hireling were either dead or disabled.

  Just like Simon.

  “How could this happen?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Miguel is—”

  “—an experienced field agent. So I was told. Two tours in Afghanistan with side work. So I was told. And he was with a vicious little thug from Mexico City. So I was told. Neither of them could expect any trouble from a private security op from Westchester. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ right?”

  Bradsher didn’t look too happy having his words flung back at him.

  “Something must have gone wrong, sir.”

  “Damn right something went wrong. This so-called dumbass—what was the term Miguel used?”

  “I believe it was zurramato, sir.”

  “Well, this zurramato obviously got the drop on them, didn’t he? Just as he undoubtedly did on Simon.”

  “It would appear so, sir.”

  “Hubris on Miguel’s part, I’m sure. After all, why should he worry about a zurramato? Do you remember me warning about luck, good and bad?”

  “Yes, sir. But unless Miguel screwed up badly—and I don’t think he did—I think more than bad luck might have been involved. We heard Stahlman mention that he’s an ex-SEAL.”

  It made sense in a way. A man worth a billion-plus like Stahlman wouldn’t hire just anybody. Nelson should have paid more attention to him but, because Dr. Fanning was not supposed to survive Saturday night, he hadn’t thought it mattered. Now it did.

  “I want a thorough background on him. Back to year zero. If he was circumcised as an infant, I want a picture of the foreskin.”

  “You’ll have it ASAP, sir.”

  Bradsher turned and left but returned less than half a minute later with his phone in his hand.

  “A new development, sir. She’s booked on a flight to Madrid, and from there to Tel Aviv.”

  Israel? Why in God’s name was she going to Israel? The panacea hadn’t originated there. He could pinpoint its origin and it was nowhere near Israel. Obviously she was on a wild-goose chase …

  Should he follow? Damn her! He had tumors growing in his lung and brain. He needed to tie this up and start treatment. But he had no choice.

  “She’s learned something … or thinks she has. Do we have someone there?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Alert him. Send him her flight information and have him keep an eye on her. Then book us to Ben Gurion.”

  Israel … what on God’s good earth could have sent her there? God himself, perhaps? It was the birthplace of the Son, after all …

  Yes … Nelson was sensing more of the hand of the Lord rather than the Serpent. Either way, he knew the Lord wanted him to follow.

  8

  “Well?” Laura said as Rick returned from a conversation with an Orthodox Jew he’d spotted waiting for the same plane to Madrid.

  He shrugged. “He’s Israeli but never heard of Gan Yosaif and doesn’t know much about kibbutzim. Says a lot of them failed in the eighties and nineties due to some economic crisis. In short, they went broke and the kibbutzniks dispersed. He suggests we check with the Israel Land Authority when we get to Tel Aviv … says they administer over ninety percent of the country’s land.”

  “I wonder if that was what happened to Chaim’s folks. Their kibbutz went broke and so they came to America—or returned to America.”

  He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “No. Just wondering if Chaim would have got into heroin if he’d stayed on the kibbutz.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it does matter. If he’d stayed in Israel he wouldn’t have wound up on my autopsy table and Mulac would still be alive and I’d be home with my daughter.”

  “Chaos effect.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re a great conversationalist, you know that?”

  “Sorry.”

  He stared off into space.

  For a while there, as they’d been working with the map in the Chetumal waiting area, he’d been different. He’d been lively and almost fun. Almost. For the first time since they’d begun their journey at JFK, they felt like a team. Now they were back to simply two travelers with the same destination.

  With nothing better to do, Laura left the first-class lounge and wandered the shops in the terminal. While browsing the English-language section of a newsstand, she spotted a somewhat familiar face.

  “Will? Is that you?”

  He jumped at the sound of her voice and turned. Yes … Will Burleigh, an internist she knew from the medical society meetings. Recognition lit his eyes. Well, not exactly lit. If anything he looked a little dismayed. Didn’t he want to be seen?

  “Oh … Laura. I don’t believe this.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird, huh? Haven’t seen you in months, and now we run into each other in Mexico City. Where are you going?”

  “South … to Mesoamerica.”

  Odd. Hardly anyone called it that. She was an exception. So apparently was Will.

  He didn’t look good—pale and drawn. He had a worn baseball cap jammed down on his salt-and-pepper hair. A fresh scar peeked over the top of his turtleneck collar.

  “Not the usual tourist d
estination—unless you’re looking for fun in the sun in Cancún.”

  He shook his head. “No fun. Just a miracle.” He glanced at his watch. “Oops. My plane’s boarding. Gotta run. Safe trip wherever you’re going.”

  And then he was hurrying off.

  How odd. A miracle? She was hunting the same thing. And he seemed to have the same level of hope as she about finding one: zero.

  In the newspaper rack she found an English-language edition of People and brought it back to where they were seated.

  Rick was on the phone. He handed it to her as she dropped into her seat.

  “Stahlman wants to speak to you.”

  His voice sounded wheezier than before. “I’m terribly sorry for what you’ve been through. I know you didn’t bargain for this and you must believe I had no idea it would turn out this way.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “Are you sure you want to continue? I feel terrible and I’m willing to prorate the amount I promised you if you want to quit.”

  That word again.

  “That’s very generous…”

  “I don’t think I could forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

  How true was that? The man had a terminal diagnosis. He wanted to live. No question that he didn’t care about the financial cost to himself, but what about the personal cost to others? Well, really, what did it matter what he thought?

  “I’m going to see this through.”

  The words startled her. They were accurate as to how she felt, but they’d come out on their own.

  He didn’t respond immediately; then, “That’s very brave. I chose you because I felt you perfect for the job. I didn’t know how perfect. Your courage and determination are a lagniappe.”

  Was it courage? She didn’t feel brave. Her mother always told her what a stubborn child she had been growing up. Was that what this boiled down to? Stubbornness?

  No. More than that. She sensed it went back to those two perfectly healthy corpses, refusing to give up their secrets. And Tommy’s perfect joints. This trip was an extension of all that—an assault on an enigmatic onion. She wouldn’t be happy until she’d peeled away all its layers of mystery and had her answers.

  Not sure how to field the compliment, she said, “‘Lagniappe’ … you don’t hear that too often in conversation.”