“Abrasive,” she said immediately. “Argumentative. And he is very protective of his equipment. I’m sure half of the reason he got away with the camera was because he’d repeatedly convinced us he was OCD with his stuff, so we gave him too much leniency.”
Eventually, our group made its way into the church. The stuffy air carried the sounds of whispering tourists and feet shuffling on the stones. It was still a functioning place of worship.
“We’re missing something, Steve,” Ivy said, falling into step beside me. “We’re ignoring an important part of the puzzle.”
“Any guesses?” I asked, looking over the highly ornamented insides of the church.
“I’m working on it.”
“Wait,” J.C. said, sauntering up. “Ivy, you think we’re missing something, but you don’t know what it is, and have no clue what it might be?”
“Basically,” Ivy said.
“Hey, skinny,” he said to me, “I think I’m missing a million dollars, but I don’t know why, or have any clue as to how I might have earned it. But I’m really sure I’m missing it. So if you could do something about that . . .”
“You are such a buffoon,” Ivy said.
“That there, that thing I said,” J.C. continued, “that was a metaphor.”
“No,” she said, “it was a logical proof.”
“Huh?”
“One intended to demonstrate that you’re an idiot. Oh! Guess what? The proof was a success! Quod erat demonstrandum. We can accurately say, without equivocation, that you are, indeed, an idiot.”
The two of them walked off, continuing the argument. I shook my head, moving deeper into the church. The place where the crucifixion had supposedly taken place was marked by a gilded alcove, congested with both tourists and the devout. I folded my arms, displeased. Many of the tourists were taking photographs.
“What?” Monica asked me.
“I’d hoped they’d forbid flash photography,” I said. “Most places like this do.” If Razon had tried to use his, it would have made it more likely that someone had spotted him.
Perhaps it was forbidden, but the security guards standing nearby didn’t seem to care what people did.
“We’ll start looking,” Monica said, gesturing curtly to her men. The three of them moved through the crowd, going about our fragile plan—which was to try to find someone at one of the holy sites who remembered seeing Razon.
I waited, noticing that a couple of the security guards nearby were chatting in Hebrew. One waved to the other, apparently going off duty, and began to walk away.
“Kalyani,” I said. “With me.”
“Of course, of course, Mister Steve.” She joined me with a hop in her step as we walked up to the departing guard.
The guard gave me a tired look.
“Hello,” I said in Hebrew with Kalyani’s help. I’d first mutter under my breath what I wanted to say, so she could translate it for me. “I apologize for my terrible Hebrew!”
He paused, then smiled. “It’s not so bad.”
“It’s dreadful.”
“You are Jewish?” he guessed. “From the States?”
“Actually, I’m not Jewish, though I am from the States. I just think a man should try to learn a country’s language before he visits.”
The guard smiled. He seemed an amiable enough fellow; of course, most people were. And they liked to see foreigners trying their own language. We chatted some more as he walked, and I found that he was indeed going off duty. Someone was coming to pick him up, but he didn’t seem to mind talking to me while he waited. I tried to make it obvious that I wanted to practice my language by speaking with a native.
His name was Moshe, and he worked this same shift almost every day. His job was to watch for people doing stupid things, then stop them—though he confided that his more important duty was to make sure no terrorist strikes happened in the church. He was extra security, not normal staff, hired for the holidays, when the government worried about violence and wanted a more visible presence in tourist sites. This church was, after all, in contested territory.
A few minutes in, I started moving the conversation toward Razon. “I’m sure you must see some interesting things,” I said. “Before we came here, we were at the Garden Tomb. There was this crazy Asian guy there, yelling at everybody.”
“Yeah?” Moshe asked.
“Yeah. Pretty sure he was American from his accent, but he had Asian features. Anyway, he had this big camera set up on a tripod—as if he were the most important person around, and nobody else deserved to take pictures. Got in this big argument with a guard who didn’t want him using his flash.”
Moshe laughed. “He was here too.”
Kalyani chuckled after translating that. “Oh, you’re good, Mister Steve.”
“Really?” I asked, casually.
“Sure was,” Moshe said. “Must be the same guy. He was here . . . oh, two days back. Kept cursing out everyone who jostled him, tried to bribe me to move them all away and give him space. Thing is, when he started taking pictures, he didn’t mind if anyone stepped in front of him. And he took shots all over the church, even outside, pointed at the dumbest locations!”
“Real loon, eh?”
“Yes,” the guard said, chuckling. “I see tourists like him all the time. Big fancy cameras that they spent a ridiculous amount on, but they don’t have a bit of photography training. This guy, he didn’t know when to turn off his flash, you know? Used it on every shot—even out in the sun, and on the altar over there, with all the lights on it!”
I laughed.
“I know!” he said. “Americans!” Then he hesitated. “Oh, uh, no offense meant.”
“None taken,” I said, relaying immediately what Kalyani said in response. “I’m Indian.”
He hesitated, then cocked his head at me.
“Oh!” Kalyani said. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mister Steve! I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s all right.”
The guard laughed. “You are good at Hebrew, but I do not think that means what you think!”
I laughed as well, and noticed a woman moving toward him, waving. I thanked him for the conversation, then inspected the church some more. Monica and her flunkies eventually found me, one of them tucking away some photos of Razon. “Nobody here has seen him, Leeds,” she said. “This is a dead end.”
“Is that so?” I asked, strolling toward the exit.
Tobias joined us, hands clasped behind his back. “Such a marvel, Stephen,” he said to me. He nodded toward an armed guard at the doorway. “Jerusalem, a city whose name literally means ‘peace.’ It is filled with islands of serenity like this one, which have seen the solemn worship of men for longer than most countries have existed. Yet here, violence is never more than a few steps away.”
Violence . . .
“Monica,” I said, frowning. “You said you’d searched for Razon on your own, before you came to me. Did that include checking to see if he was on any flights out of the States?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We have some contacts in Homeland Security. Nobody by Razon’s name flew out of the country, but false IDs aren’t that hard to find.”
“Could a fake passport get you into Israel? One of the most secure countries on the planet?”
She frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It seems risky,” I said.
“Well, this is a fine time to bring it up, Leeds. Are you saying he’s not here after all? We’ve wasted—”
“Oh, he’s here,” I said absently. “I found a guard who spoke to him. Razon took pictures all over the place.”
“Nobody we talked to saw him.”
“The guards and clergy in this place see thousands of visitors a day, Monica. You can’t show them a picture and expect them to remember. You have to focus on something memorable.”
“But—”
“Hush for a moment,” I said, holding up my hand. He got into the country. A mousy little engineer with extremely valuable equipment, using a fake passport. He had a gun back at his apartment, but hadn’t ever fired it. How did he get it?
Idiot. “Can you find out when Razon bought that gun?” I asked her. “Gun laws in the state should make it traceable, right?”
“Sure. I’ll look into it when we get to a hotel.”
“Do it now.”
“Now? Do you realize what time it is in the—”
“Do it anyway. Wake people. Get the answers.”
She glared at me, but moved off and made a few phone calls. Some angry conversations followed.
“We should have seen this earlier,” Tobias said, shaking his head.
“I know.”
Eventually, Monica moved back, slapping closed her phone. “There is no record of Razon buying a gun, ever. The one in his apartment isn’t registered anywhere.”
He had help. Of course he had help. He’d been planning this for years, and he had access to all those photos to use in proving that he was legitimate.
He’d found someone to supply him. Protect him. Someone who had given him that gun, some fake identification. They’d helped him sneak into Israel.
So whom had he approached? Who was helping him?
“Ivy,” I said. “We need . . .” I trailed off. “Where’s Ivy?”
“No idea,” Tobias said. Kalyani shrugged.
“You’ve lost one of your hallucinations?” Monica asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, summon her back.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said, and poked through the church, looking around. I got some funny looks from clergy until I finally peeked into a nook and stopped flat.
J.C. and Ivy hastily broke apart from their kissing. Her makeup was mussed, and—incredibly—J.C. had set his gun to the side, ignoring it. That was a first.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, raising a hand to my face. “You two? What are you doing?”
“I wasn’t aware we had to report the nature of our relationship to you,” Ivy said coldly.
J.C. gave me a big thumbs-up and a grin.
“Whatever,” I said. “Time to go. Ivy, I don’t think Razon was working alone. He came into the country on a fake passport, and other factors don’t add up. Could he have had some sort of aid here? Maybe a local organization to help him escape suspicion and move in the city?”
“Possible,” she said, hurrying to keep up. “I would point out it’s not impossible that he’s working alone, but it does seem unlikely, upon consideration. You thought that through on your own? Nice work!”
“Thanks. And your hair is a mess.”
We eventually reached the cars and climbed in, me with Monica, Ivy, and J.C. The two suits and my other aspects took the forward car.
“You could be right on this point,” Monica said as the cars started off.