Storm Front

fifty-fifty bet that the stone is a fake. Do you really want to spend, what, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for something that turns out to be a fake? I don’t think so.”
    They all nodded into their pancakes, and al-Lubnani muttered something to Awad, who also nodded.
    Virgil said, “You all know now that somebody firebombed my garage last night and stole the stone. I am beyond being pissed off. So I’m telling you: this is now personal, and you do not want to get in the way. Go home. I’m telling you: Go home. Everybody who understands that, raise your hand.”
    They all raised their hands, and Sewickey yawned.
    Virgil: “You’re yawning, Sewickey. You think I’m joking?”
    “No, I don’t,” Sewickey said. “I’ll talk to you about it in private. About the yawn.”
    Virgil looked at him for a moment, then said, “Right.” And to everybody else, “Go home. All of you. Go home.”
    Then he turned and headed for the door, tipping his head, and said, “Sewickey.”
    —
    S EWICKEY FOLLOWED HIM OUT into the main dining room and Virgil said, “The yawn?”
    Sewickey pointed at an empty booth, and they sat facing each other, and Sewickey interlaced his fingers on the tabletop and said, “Virgil, you’re a likable guy, and I don’t want to see you or anybody else get hurt, but you don’t understand what’s going on here.”
    “What don’t I understand? There’s this precious artifact—”
    “You don’t understand that the stone isn’t especially important. It’s the
idea
of the stone, and what everybody can squeeze out of it. Blood, already,” Sewickey said. “But the authenticity, the preciousness, the power? Nobody here really cares about that. Well, maybe this Israel archaeologist does, but the rest of us don’t.”
    “I’ve read these, uh, books about the power these kinds of things can accumulate,” Virgil ventured.
    “Virgil, Virgil. It’s all crap. It’s a fuckin’ rock. Some lunatic killer three thousand years ago wrote a note on it, and then he died and nobody gave a shit what he said. The stone was probably part of a fence or a foundation or something. Maybe a chopping block, and used when they cut the heads off pigeons.”
    “Then, what—”
    “It’s all about
us
. About me and Bauer and the Hezbollah and the Israelis. We aren’t going home. We can’t. We need this thing.”
    “So you don’t even care about—”
    “Virgil, listen. It’s all crazier than a bucket of drunk rattlesnakes, but we’ve all got our needs and they need to be tended to,” Sewickey said. “Bauer calls himself an investigative archaeologist, but you know what he majored in, in college?”
    Virgil thought for a few seconds, then guessed, “Television?”
    “Drama. He wants to be a movie star. But he
needs
this stone. All that bullshit about the planks from Noah’s Ark almost killed him off.
Nobody
believed him. That thing about getting the gopher wood at a Glendale gas station? That’s the truth of the matter.”
    “The Hezbollah guy—”
    “Al-Lubnani? You don’t really want to go back to the Hezbollah leadership and say, ‘Sorry, boys, that one kinda slipped off my plate,’” Sewickey said. “I mean, Virgil Flowers might put him in jail. The Hezbollah, on the other hand, will cut off his head with a chain saw. How hard will he think about that choice?”
    Virgil regarded him for a moment, then said, “The Search for Hitler’s Heart? The True Cross?”
    Sewickey winced, then said, “Look. I’ve got a small department. It’s me, an assistant professor, and two graduate students, funded by three rich oil and gas guys from Midland. You know what rich oil and gas guys want?”
    “More oil and gas?”
    “Well, yeah. But what they want from
me
is results. I pull down a hundred and fifty K from UT, get expense-paid trips to Istanbul and South America and Russia and a lot of other places, eat in some very good restaurants, get quoted on TV, especially in Midland, and occasionally get laid by undiscriminating museum ladies. If those rich guys go away, it’s back to Mr. Sewickey’s eighth-grade English in Bumfuck, Oklahoma. So: I won’t risk my neck for the stone—you can send it into space, for all I care—but I
need
those photos I lost, because I
need
to be the American authority on the stone. If I could get those pictures back, I’d sit in the hotel looking at the porn channel and eating fried pork rinds and wait out the . . . the . . . climax of