Storm Front

pause,
thump
.
    “This doesn’t sound good,” Yael-2 ventured. “We should call the hotel manager, and enter this room also.”
    They did that, and the assistant manager, Arjun Sharma, programmed a key and took them up. They knocked again, heard more thumps, and Sharma unlocked the door and stepped back.
    Virgil pushed the door open with his fingertips and flipped on the light. He didn’t immediately see anyone, but then saw the cowboy boots sticking out past the end of the bed, toes down. The moment he saw them, the boots lifted off the floor and landed with the thump they’d heard from outside. Virgil walked around the bed and looked down at Sewickey, who was largely wrapped in duct tape, looking something like a joint in a Cheech & Chong movie.
    He was lying on his stomach, his hands taped behind his back, with more loops around his arms, his knees, his ankles, and his mouth.
    Virgil said, “We need a knife,” but nobody had one, so he jogged down to his truck and got a knife and jogged back, flicked it open, and started by cutting the tape behind Sewickey’s head, gently unwrapping his mouth, and then his hands and his body.
    Sewickey, breathing hard, finally pushed himself up and fell on the bed and groaned, “Finally. I was afraid I’d vomit and choke to death.”
    “What happened?” Virgil asked.
    —
    Y AEL -1 HAD CALLED HIM , he said, and asked to meet—she thought they might be able to work out an alliance. When he opened the door, she stuck a gun in his face, taped him up, and then tore his room apart.
    “She got all the photographs of the stone, my camera and my cell phone—Jones has that number, it’s the only way he can reach me.”
    “So you have nothing that would prove the existence of the stone?” Virgil asked.
    He shook his head. “Nothing.” He glanced at his watch and frowned.
    “Then what?” Yael-2 asked. She glanced at Virgil and said, “Sorry.”
    “Then nothing,” Sewickey said. “I just kept trying to breathe through my nose. I thought I might be lying there until the maid came in the morning. I was afraid that she might have put the Do Not Disturb card on the door.”
    They all looked at the door, but she hadn’t done that. “Still a crime. Another one, a felony this time,” Virgil said. “When I find her, I’m going to put her in jail, and let the Mossad get her out.”
    “I can tell you one thing,” Sewickey said, pulling at the sticky tape residue in his hair. “She’s working with somebody. She called him and told him that she’d drive my car down to her motel, and for him to meet her there.”
    “Sure it was a him?” Virgil asked.
    “Well, no. But she was going to meet somebody.” Sewickey got shakily to his feet, rubbed some sticky stuff off the side of his mouth, and asked, “It’s almost ten o’clock?”
    Virgil: “Yeah?”
    “My interview. It’ll be leading the news at ten.”
    Virgil said, “Ah, man, did you really have to do that?”
    Sewickey said, “Hey. You think I’m here for my health?”

10
    T he interview actually led the news, and from the tenor of it—and from the lack of actual news later in the broadcast—Virgil realized that the trouble had only begun: the real storm would arrive the next day, when every reporter south of the Canadian line would be in town.
    Because it was just too good. Even worse, it’d been a slow news day, and the stone was definitely something to talk about.
    The report started with the portentous, hard-fat anchorman pivoting to face the TV audience in a raking light, and saying, in his best serious-news voice, “A famed archaeological explorer and specialist in ancient relics, often compared to a real-life Indiana Jones, has come to Minnesota in search of a stone that he says could quite literally rewrite the Bible and perhaps damage claims that the Jewish people have to the land of Israel. Reporter Jayden Noah Ethan has the story exclusively from Mankato.”
    The taped story featured the reporter, whose questions appeared to have been written by Sewickey, interviewing Sewickey as he stood in front of his Cadillac. Virgil noticed for the first time that it had auxiliary lights and a winch on the front end, to emphasize the explorer motif.
    Sewickey told the story of Jones’s discovery and flight from Israel, about the stone, and about Siamun/Solomon. When the report was done, Virgil took his phone from his pocket and turned it off: Davenport would be calling.
    Sewickey said to an astonished