In His Image

by James Beauseigneur

  Faure muttered an epithet.

  From Faure’s left, the door to the Security Council chamber flew open and a tall blond woman in her early forties rushed in. Undistracted, Ambassador Lee noted the count of hands: Three regions supported the ambassador from the United States. Without pause she called for those supporting Ambassador Faure. What Faure saw only intensified his despondence. Including his own, only five hands were raised: Ambassadors Kruszkegin of Northern Asia and Lee of China had chosen to abstain. Unlike Ambassador Fahd, Kruszkegin looked directly at Faure while Lee counted. Filled with rage, Faure turned to face Christopher, but Christopher was not there.

  Quickly Faure’s eyes scanned the room for Christopher, to no avail. He looked back at Poupardin, his eyes asking the question of Christopher’s whereabouts. Poupardin pointed. In a corner of the great room, Christopher stood talking with Jackie Hansen, who had arrived during the vote with an urgent message. Faure’s rage went unnoticed or at least unacknowledged by Christopher, who was listening to Jackie and quickly scanning the contents of the message she carried. Even as he read the dispatch, he began to move resolutely toward Ambassador Lee.

  Contrary to Faure’s assumption, the actual reason for the shift in votes was that Ambassadors Fahd, Kruszkegin, and Lee had learned of the promises Faure had made in order to get the vote of the Indian ambassador. They felt it was not in their interest to have a secretary-general who was under the obligations Faure had placed himself. Lee and Kruszkegin’s response was to abstain; Fahd chose instead to support the American for whom he had voted earlier. None of this would ever be known by Faure. And what was about to unfold would make him absolutely certain that the whole situation had been Christopher’s doing.

  Christopher finished reading the note and proceeded directly across the room to Ambassador Lee. Handing her the dispatch, he whispered something and she began reading. As she did, Christopher went back to his seat and stood in order to be formally recognized. All eyes watched as she read. When she finished she struck her gavel and declared that no consensus had yet been reached, and the selection of a new secretary-general would be postponed for two weeks. She then turned her eyes toward Christopher and said, “The chair recognizes the ambassador from Italy.”

  “Madam President,” Christopher began, addressing Ambassador Lee, “as you have just read in the dispatch, within the last hour a contingent of approximately twenty-seven thousand Indian infantry have crossed their mutual border with Pakistan in apparent response to continued border crossings by Pakistani refugees seeking food. They appear to be headed toward the three UN relief camps. In response to the incursion, United Nations forces under the direction of Lieutenant General Robert McCoid have engaged the Indian forces.”

  The room erupted. Members of the media tried to move to get a better shot of Christopher as he spoke; several staff personnel hurried from the room. Both the ambassador from Saudi Arabia, representing the Middle East, and the ambassador from India attempted to be recognized by the chair. But Ambassador Lee refused to recognize anyone and Christopher continued. “No report of casualties is yet available, but Indian troops in the area outnumber UN forces by six to one. General McCoid has ordered reinforcements into the area, but their arrival is not expected for several hours and the General warns that such movement will weaken UN strength at other points along the border.”

  Christopher completed his report to the Security Council and then, exercising his right as an alternate member, proceeded to make his request to remove General Brooks and to take emergency authority over the WPO. It probably would not have made any difference if he had made the request four days earlier. Still, these new events would make it much more complex and difficult to correct the problems.

  Near Capernaum, Israel

  Scott Rosen was not sure how he knew it, but there was no doubt in his mind he was supposed to be here. On a grassy hill on the northern shore of the sea of Galilee near Capernaum, he sat and waited, though not at all sure of what it was he was waiting for. He had been there for nearly an hour, just sitting and waiting, and now the sun was beginning to set. The terrain around him formed a natural amphitheater with acoustic qualities that allowed a person on the hillside to clearly hear someone speaking at the bottom of the hill. According to the local tour guides, this was the spot where Jesus had taught his followers.

  When Scott had arrived, there had been tourists walking the slopes around him. But as evening set in he had briefly been left nearly alone. Now, over the last fifteen minutes, a steady flow of people, all men, had begun to fill the hillside. But these were not tourists; there were no cameras, no binoculars, no yapping tour guides. In fact, though their number grew into the hundreds, and then thousands, no one spoke at all. Each man simply found what seemed like a good place and sat down.

  Over the next few minutes the trickle became a flood; now thousands arrived every minute. And still not an utterance was heard. Scott saw several people he knew. The first was Rabbi Eleazar ben David, to whom he had talked a few days earlier about Joel. Then he saw Joel—his hand and wrist in a cast, the result of their last meeting. Joel searched Scott out from among all the men on the hill and smiled broadly when he found him. Scott returned an anxious smile, and Joel sat down nearby. Neither said anything.

  At the end of an hour there were more than a hundred thousand, and still no one spoke. Soon there were no more arrivals and the crowd’s attention turned toward some movement at the bottom of the hill. Two men stood up and one of them began to speak. His voice was deep and rich and measured. Scott was too far away to see him clearly, but he could be heard by all. Scott recognized the voice at once. It was Saul Cohen.

  Standing at Cohen’s side, the other man remained silent as he looked up at the crowd and thought back to that pivotal summer day when he and his brother and father had fished these very waters two thousand years before.

  25

  Old Enemy, Old Friend

  Sixteen months later

  Somewhere in northern Israel

  THE FRIGID, RAIN-STARVED GROUND cracked beneath the old man’s weight as he walked along at a steady, purposeful pace toward the west. Even his gaunt appearance and wind-dried skin did not reveal the man’s true age, which was thirty years beyond what anyone might have guessed. As he crested the top of a small hill, he could see, still some miles distant, the silhouette of the gold-domed Bahá’í temple above the terraced city of Haifa, which marked the end of his trek. After fourteen days in the Galilean wilderness he looked forward to a few days of regular meals, human contact, and a much-needed bath. The nearly empty pack on his back had been overstuffed with dried fruits and nuts when he started. His canteens, now empty, had added quite a bit of weight to his initial load two weeks earlier.

  Normally, after a brief stay at the temple, he would be off again for another week or two in the wilderness, but this time there were other tasks that required his attention. For more than a year, since the cremation of his close friend and confidante Alice Bernley, Robert Milner, the former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, had lived the life of a monk, going off into the wilderness of Israel for up to three weeks at a time before returning to the civilization of the Bahá’í temple. His only companion on these journeys was Tibetan Master Djwlij Kajm, Alice Bernley’s former spirit guide. During Bernley’s cremation Djwlij Kajm had come to Milner and spoken to him in Bernley’s voice. Up until that time Milner had known the Tibetan only through Alice, his channel to the physical world. Now Milner knew him in a much more intimate way. Over the last sixteen months, Master Djwlij Kajm had taught and trained Milner for the work to be done. Finally, on this most recent journey, Milner had completed his spiritual apprenticeship and had received into himself a guiding spirit who united with his own, the two becoming one.

  The mission that called Robert Milner out of the wilderness at this time would take him in a few days to the city of Jerusalem, where he would await the arrival of Christopher Goodman and Decker Hawthorne.
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br />   New York, New York

  “We cannot afford to compound our mistake by letting this go on any longer!” French Ambassador Albert Faure declared as he brought his fist down on the table before him. Nearby, Faure’s chief of staff, Gerard Poupardin silently surveyed the reactions of the other Security Council members. From his perspective, the address seemed to be going well.

  “It has been nearly sixteen months since this body voted to give emergency authority to the ambassador from Italy to personally direct the operations of the World Peace Organization. At that time we were assured by the ambassador that he had substantial evidence to corroborate his charges of corruption by the WPO’s commanding general. No doubt the decision of this body came in part as a result of the incursion of Indian forces into Pakistan and in part because of our shared concern for the plight of the Pakistani refugees. And yet now, sixteen months later, we have still been given no concrete evidence of any complicity in, nor culpability for, any wrongdoing of any sort by General Brooks. Indeed, while the losses of materiel have dropped dramatically, there is every reason to believe that this has been solely due to new security measures, which General Brooks was in the process of implementing even as Ambassador Goodman stood before this body requesting emergency authority to place General Brooks on administrative leave, and then took direct control of the WPO into his own, far less experienced hands.

  “And is it possible that a more pernicious hour could have been chosen by the Italian ambassador for making his charges, than at the very moment the incursion into Pakistan had begun? Charges whose only result was to undermine the structure of authority, incite derision, and weaken the esprit de corps of our forces when the leadership and guidance of General Brooks was most critically needed?

  “And so, what began with the incursion of a few thousand troops has grown into what must be considered a full-fledged war between two peace-loving regions that threatens the borders of a third, China. And ironically, though the drought that led to the war has now lessened, still the war goes on, prolonging the famine by diverting resources and energy into fighting instead of into planting crops.”

  For twenty-five minutes this went on. Faure held nothing back. His intent was to ascribe to Christopher as much responsibility for the war as he possibly could. All of his charges hinged on Christopher’s inability to produce conclusive evidence proving General Brooks was responsible for the losses of equipment and supplies incurred by the WPO. In the four days Faure had bought for him, Brooks had done an excellent job of covering his tracks beneath heaps of shredded documents. As for Faure’s charges that Christopher was responsible for the continued hostilities in the region, history proved this a dubious conclusion. Since 1947, when Pakistan was carved out of what had been northern India, the two countries had been at war four times and at the brink of war on a dozen other occasions. That a war, once started, would continue and expand was no more surprising than that a brush fire, once lit, would continue until it has consumed everything around it. And if there was a threat to China, it was a well-deserved one, for China’s arms merchants had very quickly accepted the offers of hard currency from the Pakistani government. Even Faure’s charge that Christopher had taken control of the WPO into his own hands had only a little more than a trace of truth. Although Christopher was consulted regularly on the WPO’s efforts, from the outset he had placed Lieutenant General Robert McCoid in charge of operations.

  Still, Faure was making his point convincingly. And it was an address for which much preparation had been made. In the weeks prior, General Brooks’ supporters and later Brooks himself had heavily lobbied members of the Security Council and other influential UN members. Faure’s goal was clearly not just to force a vote to restore General Brooks to power, but to so humiliate Christopher that he would not be able to maintain his position as Europe’s alternate to the Security Council. Key to the plan’s success was that those who had engineered Christopher’s election were apparently no longer a factor: Alice Bernley was dead and Robert Milner had not been seen since her funeral. But removing Christopher was just one part of Faure’s plan.

  In the months following Faure’s unsuccessful bid to become secretary-general, every other imaginable candidate had been considered, but none could muster the unanimous support of the Security Council. Faure had seen to that. As the possibility of a consensus lessened, the frequency of the attempts also decreased, and the rotating position of Security Council president had come to be treated as acting secretary-general. It was Faure’s intent that it remain that way until he could make a renewed bid for the office himself. But it would have to come soon, and Faure knew it. If the status quo remained for much longer the Security Council might decide to make it a permanent arrangement. In preparation for the renewed bid, Faure was doing favors wherever he could, trying to appear as fair and as diplomatic as possible. Except, of course, to those who got in his way. Faure considered Christopher to be in the latter category.

  In a slightly different category was Nikhil Gandhi. He was not inflexible, but so far Faure had found his price to be too high. Giving him what he wanted would mean alienating others. Faure would have preferred the election of Gandhi’s chief rival, Rajiv Advani, as primary to the Security Council. Advani and Faure had gotten along well as alternate members. Advani was now India’s prime minister, but Faure had no doubt that he would prefer being India’s primary … should anything unfortunate happen to Nikhil Gandhi.

  Kruszkegin and Lee presented a bigger problem for Faure. Both had served many years with Secretary-General Jon Hansen, and both had grown to distrust Faure in the last year. Lee and Kruszkegin talked frequently, and both had come to the conclusion that Faure must never become secretary-general. If Faure was patient, he could hope that Lee would retire soon. Kruszkegin, however, could be expected to be around for at least five or six more years. And Faure was not that patient.

  When the vote came, it was a humiliating loss for Christopher. He had defended himself well when it came his turn to speak, but in the end only Lee, Kruszkegin, and Ruiz of South America voted to sustain Christopher’s emergency powers over the WPO. Christopher remained as chairman and titular head of WPO, but General Brooks was restored to his position as commander of the actual forces.

  Decker Hawthorne watched the vote on closed-circuit from his office in the UN Secretariat building, then hurried across the street to Christopher’s office at the Italian Mission to be there when he arrived. Christopher was obviously angry and frustrated—two emotions he almost never displayed.

  “Well, did you see it?” Christopher asked in a sickened tone as soon as Decker walked in.

  “I saw,” Decker answered, the anger in his own voice tempered by a desire to be as comforting as possible.

  “The worst part is that it’s my own fault!”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Decker said consolingly. “Faure has been at this game a lot longer than you.”

  Christopher didn’t seem to take much consolation in that. “How could I have been so stupid as to have gone to Faure and told him I was going to launch an investigation of General Brooks? I must have been out of my mind!” Christopher paced as he spoke.

  “It may not have been the smartest thing, but I’m sure your intention was to do the right thing. You simply gave Faure the benefit of the doubt,” said Decker.

  “I gave him a lot more than that!” Christopher fumed. “I gave him four days of warning. It’s no wonder I couldn’t prove anything: General Brooks had four full days to destroy the evidence. I made a total fool of myself.” Christopher shook his head introspectively. “It’s no wonder Gandhi and Fahd voted against me, but Tanaka and Howell?” he said, referring to the ambassadors from Japan and Canada, respectively. “Are they blind? Don’t they see what Faure is? He’d bring the whole world down around him if he thought that when it was all over he could stand at the top of the heap of rubble and declare himself king!

  “You know, it never made sense to me that when the voting
on a new secretary-general first began, Faure seconded the nomination of Ambassador Tanaka. And then later, when the West Africans rejected Tanaka, Faure was there to suggest Kruszkegin as a compromise candidate. It seemed so out of character for Faure to be promoting anyone but himself. I thought maybe I had been wrong about him: Kruszkegin would have made a great secretary-general. So when things worked out that Faure was nominated, it worried me at first but then I almost got used to the idea. Well, it took me a long time to realize it, but I’m convinced the only reason Faure seconded the nomination of the Japanese ambassador and later supported Kruszkegin was to build a base for his own nomination. I don’t think he had any intention of helping Kruszkegin or Tanaka. It was all part of his plan to be elected secretary-general himself.”

  Anger burned in Christopher’s eyes. He stopped and stared out his window. Outside, freezing rain fell on the street-blackened remains of the snow that had fallen three days earlier. “I’ve got to get away from here for a while,” Christopher said.

  “Why don’t you take a few days and go stay at the house in Maryland? In fact, if you don’t mind the company, I’ll go along with you.” It had been nearly six months since Decker had visited the house in Derwood. He wanted to make sure that it, and more importantly the grave of Elizabeth, Hope, and Louisa, had been well cared for by the agency he had hired to see to the property.