by Mark Alpert
Shaking with fervor, he bent over until his forehead touched the ground. Then he prayed without words, breathing soundlessly on the warm, brown dirt.
Several minutes passed. Cyrus couldn’t say exactly how many; when he prayed he entered a world where it was impossible to keep track of the time. But at some point he heard footsteps, so he opened his eyes. He stood up and saw one of his bodyguards ascending the hill, marching straight toward him.
It was Tamara, his favorite, the truest of the True Believers. Tall and lithe, she wore a desert-camouflage uniform and carried an M-4 carbine. Her hair was so short that none of it showed under her Kevlar helmet. She looked like an ordinary soldier, a young, fresh-faced American infantrywoman, and that was exactly what she’d been until three years ago, when Brother Cyrus had enlisted her to his cause. He’d discovered that the U.S. Army was a good place to recruit his followers. There were so many wounded souls, so many soldiers in desperate need of the Lord’s guidance.
Cyrus picked up his scarf from the ground and swiftly wrapped it around his head. Even Tamara, his closest follower, wasn’t allowed to view his face. It was too repellent.
She halted and stood at attention about five feet away. Her right hand started to rise, but she stopped herself from saluting. Cyrus had told his followers many times that there was no need to salute him, but they sometimes did anyway. “Peace be with you, Brother,” she said. “Are you ready to return to the base camp? I don’t like leaving you here in the open for too long.”
He nodded. “Yes, I’m ready. I just finished my prayers.” He smiled behind his mask, stretching his hideous lips. Then he started walking down the hill, planting his feet carefully on the rocky slope. “How are things at the camp this morning? Has Michael Gupta settled in yet?”
Tamara fell in step beside him. “Michael spent the whole night studying the Logos file. About an hour ago I told him to take a break, but he wouldn’t leave the computer. I have a feeling he’s going to be there all day.”
Cyrus smiled again. He’d suspected that the program would fascinate the child. The young genius couldn’t resist looking at it. And with the Lord’s help, he would soon complete the task. “Has he made any changes to the file?”
“No, not yet. The boy’s been scrolling through the code for hours, but he hasn’t made a single change. It’s the strangest thing.” She stared at the horizon as she made her way downhill. The sun was already scorching the brown landscape. “You know what I think, Brother? I think he’s memorizing the code. And he’s making all the changes in his head.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. What else would you expect from the great-great-grandson of Albert Einstein? Once he completes the program, we’ll convince him to write it down for us.”
“He’s sad, Brother. So sad. His life has been so unfair.” She shook her head. “He’s suffered so much. And he doesn’t deserve it.”
Cyrus stopped on the hillside and looked at her closely. Tamara was usually a resolute soldier, a calm and imperturbable Warrior of God, but now she seemed distressed. As she halted beside him, still staring at the horizon, Cyrus noticed that her eyes were wet. She was thinking, no doubt, of her own history. Like Michael, Tamara had survived some fairly brutal events—a father who ran off, a mother who died young, a childhood spent in foster homes in rural Kentucky. So it was no surprise that she felt some sympathy for the boy. But Cyrus worried that this emotion might be a hindrance now. Their plans were at a critical stage, and the Lord needed them to be steadfast.
“Tamara,” he said quietly, “you know why the boy has suffered. In this corrupt world, pain and horrors afflict everyone.”
She nodded. “Yes, Brother, I know.”
“But the Almighty is coming to save us. He’s focusing His will right now on this place, this desert.” Cyrus swept his arm in a circle, pointing at the lifeless hills around them. “Once the boy completes the code, we can make the adjustments to Excalibur. And then God’s holy sword will put an end to this suffering world and lead us all into the kingdom!”
She nodded again but kept her eyes on the horizon. Cyrus stretched his hand toward her and gently gripped her chin. Then he turned her head so he could look directly at her. “The Lord needs you to be strong, Tamara. Can you do that? Can you be strong for Him?”
“Yes, Brother!” she shouted. Her voice was as loud as a drill sergeant’s and her gray eyes flashed. “I serve the Lord! I long to see His blessed face!”
“Very good. Now let’s get back to camp.” He resumed walking down the rocky slope. “I assume everything else is going smoothly? You’ve made all the preparations for tonight’s transit?”
“Yes, we’re scheduled to depart at twenty-two-hundred hours.” Her voice was confident, but there was still a hint of anxiety in her expression. She bit her lower lip as she marched beside him. “We just received a message, though. From Keller.”
Cyrus frowned. Although Keller was one of his allies, the man wasn’t a True Believer. He was a bureaucratic underling, a money-hungry assistant in the U.S. Department of Justice. Out of necessity, Cyrus had assembled a network of paid informants in Washington. These men knew nothing of the Lord’s plans and their motives were despicable, but by selling their information to Cyrus, they unwittingly aided God’s holy cause. “What did Keller say?”
“He intercepted another e-mail about the FBI investigation of the explosion at Steele’s laboratory. Agent Parker is continuing to pursue information about Steele’s research. She put in a request to travel to Israel, and the Bureau director approved it.”
Cyrus nodded. Special Agent Lucille Parker, who’d headed the FBI task force that had done such a poor job of protecting Michael Gupta, was now apparently determined to make amends for her failure. “Well, I was expecting this, but not so soon,” he said. “I didn’t think the investigation would progress so quickly. Is Parker traveling alone to Israel?”
“No, she’s going with Michael’s guardians. She made a special request to bring along David Swift and Monique Reynolds. They’re scheduled to arrive in Israel this afternoon.”
Very interesting, Cyrus thought. Parker was obviously relying on their scientific expertise. And Swift and Reynolds could make things difficult. But it was presumptuous to think that the path of Redemption would be easy. The Scriptures had foretold a great battle. The servants of the Lord would have to fight Satan’s army before they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
“I have new orders for you, Tamara,” he said. “As soon as we get to camp, send an encrypted message to Nicodemus. Tell him about the visitors to the Holy Land and ask him to prepare a proper greeting.”
9
THE FBI LEARJET GOT PERMISSION TO LAND AT TEL NOF, A MILITARY AIRFIELD in central Israel. David and Monique sat in the last row of the cabin, behind Lucille. As the plane descended toward the air base, David looked out the cabin window and saw a dozen F-16s lined up on the tarmac. Every thirty seconds, one of the fighter jets took off with a roar and joined the fleet of planes patrolling the country’s airspace. The Israeli Air Force was on high alert in response to the Iranian nuclear test. On the other side of the base, several armored vehicles were clustered around a concrete bunker. Tel Nof, David knew, was one of the sites where Israel stored its nuclear weapons. The country had its own nukes and would use them if necessary.
He shook his head. He couldn’t worry about nuclear apocalypse right now. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand. He and Monique were in Israel because they’d convinced Lucille that they could help her track down Olam ben Z’man, Jacob Steele’s secret collaborator. They had some tangible skills to offer—Monique knew the physics better than anyone, while David knew plenty of Israeli scientists through his work with Physicists for Peace. But their greatest asset was their desperation. If Lucille hadn’t agreed to bring them along, they would’ve come to Israel anyway and begun their own investigation. Michael had been missing for thirty-six hours now, with no word from his kidnappers. Neither David nor Monique cou
ld rest until they’d found him.
Unfortunately, the search stalled as soon as they arrived at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They’d assumed from the start that Olam ben Z’man—a name that didn’t appear in any Israeli records—was a fanciful code name that one of the university’s professors had adopted. Because there was a chance that this professor had shared his secret with a colleague at the school, Lucille headed for the computer science department and began questioning the faculty members and students. David and Monique sat in on the interviews; they’d brought some respectable suits to Israel so they would look more official. Several of the interviewees laughed when Lucille mentioned the name Olam ben Z’man. But no one had heard it before.
The only other clue came from Verizon Communications, which had tracked down the phone calls that Adam Bennett had mentioned, the calls Olam ben Z’man had made to Jacob Steele’s laboratory. The records showed that these calls had indeed originated from a fiber-optic line in Israel. What’s more, the very same line had been used on other occasions to transmit millions of gigabytes of data, sometimes sending the information from Israel to the University of Maryland and sometimes carrying it in the opposite direction. But according to officials at Bezeq—the Israeli phone company—the line didn’t connect to any computer at Hebrew University. Instead, the flow of data seemed to terminate at a switching station in East Jerusalem, on the Palestinian side of the city.
By the end of the day Lucille decided to reach out for help. She called an agent she knew at Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI. Lucille had worked with this agent a few years before, helping him identify a Brooklyn imam who raised money for Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, so he owed her a favor. First, she asked him to send one of Shin Bet’s telecommunications experts to the East Jerusalem switching station. Then she set up a meeting to talk about the search for Olam ben Z’man. Because the agent insisted on seeing no one but Lucille, she headed alone to a hummus restaurant near the Shin Bet headquarters. Before leaving, though, she asked David and Monique to go to the switching station to confer with the communications expert.
The station turned out to be a small windowless building located just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. It was 7:30 P.M. when they arrived, fifteen minutes before sunset. As David stepped out of the rental car he shielded his eyes from the sun and gazed at the spires and minarets of the Old City, which gleamed magnificently in the golden light. Then he turned around and stared at the ancient, sprawling cemetery that stretched eastward toward the Mount of Olives. Monique, meanwhile, eyed the switching station, paying particular attention to the antennas on the building’s roof.
They found the Shin Bet expert, Aryeh Goldberg, in front of the station, bent over a set of blueprints he’d spread across the hood of his car. He was a short, chunky man in his late forties or early fifties, wearing jeans and a gray polo shirt. He’d propped his glasses on top of his balding head so he could scrutinize the schematics. He was so engrossed that at first he didn’t hear Monique say, “Hello, Mr. Goldberg.” But when she repeated the greeting he stood up straight and smiled. He had a dark complexion and lively brown eyes, and he seemed unperturbed by the fact that they were making him work overtime. Lowering his glasses, he shook hands with Monique and then with David.
“Ah, the Americans!” he said in heavily accented English. “My supervisor says you’re from the FBI, yes? The G-men? And now the G-women, too?” He pointed at Monique. “I know about the G-men because I have the DVD of that gangster movie, the one with Kevin Costner in it. You know the movie I’m talking about?”
Monique smiled back at him. “Yes, I do. But right now—”
“I know, you’re in a hurry. But I have to tell you, we have a very big mess here. You won’t believe what a big mess this is.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s such a mess I can’t see what happened to your data. I know the signals from Maryland came to this station and were shunted to line number three-seventeen. That’s a dedicated fiber-optic line, installed by Bezeq last year. I know the line exists, because I went inside the station a few minutes ago and saw it on the control panel. But it’s not on the map!” He slapped the blueprints. “I have to tell you, I don’t understand it. Bezeq is supposed to update these maps every week.”
Monique narrowed her eyes. Although she wasn’t a real FBI agent, she knew a clue when she saw one. “Who ordered the installation of the line?”
“That’s another crazy thing. I checked the order and there’s no name on it. And the address is a post office box. But the person who ordered the line has been paying his bills, so at least Bezeq is happy, yes?”
“Is there any way to find out where the line goes? Maybe by talking to the crew that installed it?”
Aryeh made a face. “Ah, those guys are schmucks. I know a quicker way.” He folded the blueprints and threw them into the backseat of his car. Then he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight. “Line three-seventeen is bunched with five other lines inside a cable that runs into the Old City. So we’ll just follow that cable. We’ll see where your line branches off, yes?”
“Can you do that? Don’t the cables run underground?”
“Yes, in most places that’s true. But everything is crazy in the Old City. The archaeologists won’t let Bezeq dig there, so they string the lines wherever they can.” He locked his car and started walking toward the Old City’s wall. “Come, this way. The cable runs through the Lions’ Gate.”
Aryeh walked quickly for a small man. David and Monique followed him, heading for an archway flanked by lions carved into the stone wall. David recognized this entrance to the Old City—he’d seen the Lions’ Gate before, when he’d visited Jerusalem ten years ago, but now it shocked him anew with its simple beauty. For a historian, the Old City was truly heaven on earth. Less than a mile across, it was filled to bursting with ancient mosques and temples and churches. David looked to his left and spotted the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine that dominated this part of the city. It sat on an elevated plaza that the Jews called the Temple Mount, because that was where their Holy Temple had stood before the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD. And just below the Temple Mount was the Via Dolorosa, the path Jesus had taken on his way to the Cross. It was enough to inspire even an agnostic like David, who was raised Catholic but hadn’t stepped inside a church in thirty years.
They went through the Lions’ Gate, then walked down a gently sloping alley paved with stones worn smooth by millennia of foot traffic. The alley was crowded with people headed in the opposite direction, mostly Palestinian women in white head scarves leaving the Old City with full shopping bags. A flock of elderly nuns shuffled past, followed by a pair of Israeli soldiers nervously patrolling the Muslim quarter. Both sides of the alley were lined with shops offering trinkets for the tourists—T-shirts, posters, skullcaps, hookahs, and a wide variety of garish oil paintings depicting the Crucifixion. Palestinian men sat in front of the shops, under awnings of rusted iron, drinking tea from slender glasses. They looked suspiciously at Aryeh Goldberg but said nothing as he shone his flashlight down the darkening alley. He pointed the beam at a black cable that ran just above the awnings.
After a few hundred yards they came to a stone wall where the cable passed near a round plaque. A large group of men wearing brown robes and sandals clustered around the plaque, which was inscribed with the Roman numeral I. David recognized this place, too—it was the Via Dolorosa’s starting point, the first Station of the Cross, where Pontius Pilate had condemned Jesus to death. The men in robes were Christian pilgrims who assembled at this spot every evening to reenact Christ’s suffering, ritually parading down the Via Dolorosa until they reached the famous tomb inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Several pilgrims carried big wooden crosses balanced on their shoulders. Others wore realistic-looking crowns of thorns and read aloud from their Bibles. There were so many pilgrims that they blocked the alley, slowing the foot traffic
to a standstill.
Aryeh pushed through the crowd, keeping his flashlight trained on the cable. He looked over his shoulder at David and Monique. “The junction box is over there,” he said, pointing at a steel cabinet clamped to the wall a few yards away. “I need to open it to see where line three-seventeen goes. This may take a few minutes. I have to get past all the crazy goyim here.”
While Aryeh fought his way to the junction box, David glanced at Monique. She stood with her back to the wall, scanning the crowd. The pilgrims were apparently making her nervous. Many of them seemed overcome with emotion. At least a dozen knelt on the cobblestones, shouting Bible verses and weeping inconsolably. One of the cross-bearing pilgrims flung himself to the ground and almost hit Monique with the bottom end of his giant crucifix. She let out a cry and jumped to the side. “Jesus!” she yelled. “Watch where you’re going!”
The pilgrim, whose swarthy, stubbled face was streaked with tears, said nothing in response. He simply staggered to his feet and continued trudging down the alley. Monique glowered at him.
David smiled, trying to cheer her up. “I don’t think Jesus heard you.”
She didn’t think it was funny. Scowling, she kept her eyes on the crowd. “This place is insane. Look at all these wackos.”
“It’s not their fault. Most of them are probably suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome.”
“Is this another joke?”
“No, it’s a genuine mental disorder. Israeli psychiatrists have written papers about it. Every year dozens of tourists who visit Jerusalem become convinced that they’re the Messiah. The delusion usually goes away when they leave the city.”