Storm Front

his neck; in general, he looked like a decent third-baseman, which he’d been in high school and for a while in college, until he found out he couldn’t reliably hit a college-level fastball.
    After college, he did time in the army, expecting an assignment in the infantry or intelligence. The army made him a cop, which, to his surprise, he liked. He was a captain when he got out, landed a job with the St. Paul cops, and a few years later, moved to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Now he was the only resident agent in the southern end of the state. He would work six or eight murders in the course of an average year, and spend the rest of his time chasing down people whose criminal activities required more range than an individual sheriff’s office could normally cover. Ma Nobles, for example, lived in one county, her son in another, a suspected accomplice in a third, and the lumber might well be hidden underwater, precisely on a county line.
    In addition to his cop duties, Virgil was an outdoor writer, though he’d recently branched out and had stories printed in both the
New York Times
magazine and
Vanity Fair
. Despite a mild disregard for money, between the state job and the writing, he found himself edging toward affluence.
    So that’s what he did. Meth labs had been his special curse for quite a while, generating a number of the killings he’d worked, but now they were beginning to fade away.
    Tough, on-the-ball law enforcement, Virgil was proud to say, had forced Minnesota criminals to go back to stealing.
    —
    V IRGIL GOT OUT of Cabela’s for two hundred dollars, not a bad price, considering the possibilities, and made it into the airport’s short-term parking a half hour before Yael Aronov’s plane was scheduled to land. He bought a fishing magazine at a newsstand and a croissant at Starbucks, and settled in to wait.
    He was deep into a pro-and-con article on the use of bucktails when his phone rang, a call from an unknown number.
    “Yes?”
    “Is this Agent Flowers?”
    “Yes, it is.”
    “The plane has landed. Your supervisor gave me this number and said you would meet me. Are you here?”
    “Yes. In baggage claim. You’re at carousel nine. I’m a tall, thin man with cowboy boots and a straw hat, sitting in the chairs facing the carousel.”
    “Very good. I will be there as soon as I can.”
    —
    S HE WAS another twenty minutes. Virgil finished the bucktails story and was reading about Bulldawg technique when people began gathering around the carousel. He put the magazine away, and two minutes later, a woman walked up and said, “You’re the only cowboy. You must be Virgil?”
    “Yes, I am,” Virgil said, unfolding from the chair.
    They shook hands and she said, “Yael Aronov,” and, “I have two large bags.”
    “That’s fine,” Virgil said. “Where are you staying?”
    “At the Mankato Downtown Inn? Is that correct?”
    “That’s correct,” Virgil said.
    Yael was a tall woman in her late twenties or early thirties, athletic, with dark hair cut short, regular features, an olive complexion, and quick, dark eyes. She was pretty, but if Virgil had been asked what she looked like, he would have said, “Tough.”
    “I’m tired. It was straight through—Tel Aviv to Newark, and then a long layover in Newark and then to here,” she said. “I need to sleep.”
    “I was never told who you work for, exactly,” Virgil said. “I understand you’re looking for an artifact of some kind.”
    “I work for the Israel Antiquities Authority, the IAA. I’m an investigator—really, the only investigator,” she said. “We’re looking for part of a stele”—she pronounced it
stella
—“that was stolen by this Reverend Jones.”
    “I don’t know exactly what a stele is.”
    “Okay, I will tell you,” she said. “In the ancient Middle East, the various kings, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian, when they conquered a place, would sometimes put up a stone pillar boasting about their conquest. They often inscribed the pillar with more than one language, usually their own and the local language. Then, after they died, another conqueror would come along, and the old pillars would get thrown down and broken up, and maybe new pillars set up. What Reverend Jones found was a piece of one of these pillars, a piece of a stele. Unfortunately, he stole it, and carried it out of the country.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “One hundred percent,” she said.
    Jones, she said, had been