He had and was pleased that her mind was working, too.

“Where a retreating star finds a rose, pierces a wooden cross, and converts silver to gold. Find the place.” She motioned at the photo from the book. “The sacrarium door. Bethlehem. The Nativity. This is Belém. Remember what we read this morning in London. Portuguese for ”Bethlehem.“ And what did Haddad write? Great journeys often start with an epiphany.”

“I think you’re going to make it to Final Jeopardy,” he said.

Glass shattered in the distance.

“That came from inside the cloister,” McCollum said.

Malone darted for the light switch and killed the halogens. Darkness again engulfed them and his eyes needed a moment to adjust.

Another crash.

He crept to the open door and identified the sound’s direction. Catty-corner across the cloister, on the far side, lower level.

He saw movement in the semi-darkness and spotted three men emerging from another set of glass doors.

Each carried a weapon.

The three fanned out into the lower gallery.

FIFTY-TWO

WASHINGTON, DC

2:45 PM

STEPHANIE HANDED THE ATTENDANT HER TICKET AND ENTERED the National Air and Space Museum. Green had not come with them, because the attorney general’s presence in such a public place would not have gone unnoticed. Stephanie had chosen the locale for the building’s many transparent walls, reputation as the world’s most visited museum, abundance of security staff, and metal detectors. She doubted Daley would, at this point, invoke anything official that might lead to uncomfortable questions, but he could bring Heather Dixon and her new Arab associates.

They pushed through the crowds and glanced around at the museum’s three-block-long interior composed of steel, marble, and glass. Ceilings soared at nearly a hundred feet, creating a hangarlike effect, and displayed a history of flight from the Wright Brothers’ flier, to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, to the Apollo 11 moon ship.

“Lots of people,” Cassiopeia muttered.

They passed an IMAX theater with a thick line of patrons and entered the busy Space Hall. Daley stood near a full-sized, spiderlike Lunar Module, displayed as it would have appeared on the moon, with an astronaut balanced on its landing leg ladder.

Daley looked calm, considering. Not a hair on his head had escaped its usual brilliantine hold.

“Got your clothes back on,” she said as they approached.

“I underestimated you, Stephanie. My mistake. I won’t make it again.”

“You leave all your escorts at home?” She knew Daley rarely went anywhere without bodyguards.

“All but one.”

He motioned and she and Cassiopeia turned. Heather Dixon appeared from the far side of the Skylab exhibit.

“Deal’s off, Larry,” she said.

“You want to know about the Alexandria Link? She’s the one to fill in the gaps.”

Dixon strolled through the crowd toward them. A group of noisy children congealed at the Lunar Module, hugging the wooden railing that wrapped the display. Daley led them closer to a narrow walk on its rear side that paralleled a glass wall, the museum’s busy cafeteria beyond.

“You’re still dead,” Dixon said to her.

“I didn’t come here to be threatened.”

“And I’m only here because my government ordered me.”

“First things first,” Daley said.

Dixon brought out an electronic device about the size of a cell phone and switched it on. After a few seconds, she shook her head. “They’re not wired.”

Stephanie knew how the device worked. Billet agents routinely used them. She grabbed the detector and pointed it at Dixon and Daley.

Negative, too.

She tossed it back to Dixon. “Okay, since we’re alone, talk.”

“You’re a bitch,” Dixon said.

“Great. Now could you get to the point of this drama?”

“Here it is, short and sweet,” Daley said. “Thirty years ago George Haddad was reading a copy of a Saudi Arabian gazette, published in Riyadh, studying place-names in west Arabia, translating them into Old Hebrew. Why he was doing that, I have no idea. Sounds like watching paint dry. But he began to notice that some of the locations were biblical.”

“Old Hebrew,” Cassiopeia said, “is a tough language. No vowels. Hard to interpret and loaded with ambiguities. You have to know what you’re doing.”

“An expert?” Dixon asked.

“Hardly.”

“Haddad is an expert,” Daley said, “and here’s the problem. These biblical place-names he noticed were concentrated in a strip about four hundred miles long and one hundred wide, in the western portion of Saudi Arabia.”

“Asir?” Cassiopeia asked. “Where Mecca is?”

Daley nodded. “Haddad spent years looking at other locales but could find no similar concentration of Old Hebrew biblical place-names anywhere else in the world, and that included Palestine itself.”

Stephanie realized that the Old Testament was a record of ancient Jews. So if the place-names in modern-day west Arabia, translated into Old Hebrew, were actually biblical locations, that could have enormous political implications. “Are you saying there were no Jews in the Holy Land?”

“Of course not,” Dixon said. “We were there. All he’s saying is that Haddad believed that the Old Testament was a record of the Jewish experience in west Arabia. Before they traveled north to what we know as Palestine.”

“The Bible came from Arabia?” Stephanie asked.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Daley said. “Haddad’s conclusions were confirmed when he started matching geography. For more than a century archaeologists have tried to find, in Palestine, sites that match biblical descriptions. But nothing fits. Haddad discovered that if you match locales in west Arabia, translated into Old Hebrew, with biblical geography, location after location matches.”

Stephanie was still skeptical. “Why has no one noticed this before? Haddad’s surely not the only person who can understand Old Hebrew.”

“Others have noticed,” Dixon said. “Three, between 1948 and 2002.”

Stephanie caught the finality of Dixon’s tone. “But your government took care of them? That’s why Haddad had to be killed?”

Dixon did not answer.

Cassiopeia broke the moment. “This all goes back to the conflicting claims, doesn’t it? God made a covenant with Abraham and gave him the Holy Land. Genesis says the covenant passed through Abraham’s son Isaac to the Jews.”

“It’s been assumed for centuries,” Daley said, “that the land God identified for Abraham lay in what we know as Palestine. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if, instead, the land God identified was somewhere else? Somewhere far from Palestine. In west Arabia.”

Cassiopeia chuckled. “You’re nuts. The Old Testament has its roots there? In the heart of Islam? The land of the Jews, what God promised them, contains Mecca? A few years ago factions of Islam rioted worldwide over a cartoon of Muhammad. Can you imagine what they would do with this?”

Daley seemed unmoved. “Which is why the Saudis and the Israelis wanted Haddad dead. He said proof of his theory was to be found within the lost Library of Alexandria. And he was told that this was the case by someone called a Guardian.”

“As were those other three individuals,” Dixon said. “Each one visited by an emissary called a Guardian, who offered a way to find the library.”

“What kind of proof could there possibly be?” Stephanie asked.

Daley seemed impatient. “Haddad told the Palestinian authorities five years ago that he believed ancient documents could be used to verify his conclusions. Just an Old Testament, written before the time of Christ, in its original Hebrew could prove decisive. None older than the tenth century exist today. Haddad knew from other writings that have survived that there were biblical texts in the Library of Alexandria. Finding one may be the only way to prove anything, since the Saudis will not allow archaeological research in Asir.”