The Portent

by Michael S. Heiser

  “I know this turns everything you’ve protected upside down,” Neff admitted. “Your life here is a basically a wash. Whatever you had in the bank is essentially gone, too. We could move the money for you electronically, but if this Ferguson discovered your location, he’d trace the money trail, and that puts our money-laundering network at risk. I can’t allow that.”

  Melissa’s expression hardened. “It sounds irrational, but I just can’t bear the thought of leaving everything behind again,” she said, exasperated. “Although it’s not like there’s any real choice.”

  “We did it once, and we can do it again,” Brian said.

  “But we had something to start on. I at least had a job.”

  “I know,” he said somberly.

  “Listen to the two of you,” Neff scolded. “You still can’t trust anyone but the friends who lived your trauma with you. I can replace everything you’ll leave behind, but you’re blind to it. Is it too fantastic to believe that God would providentially have our paths converge and give us the resources to help you? Do you believe God has a purpose for your lives, or not?”

  Brian and Melissa sat in stunned silence, the sting of the rebuke tempered only by the magnanimous gesture. Brian nodded, unable to speak. “Thank you,” Melissa said haltingly. “If your team accepts us, we’ll go.”

  Malone turned toward the back. “Let’s get moving. Everyone gave it an instant thumbs-up on the other end, even Summit.”

  “What did Sabi say?” Neff asked as he put the car in drive.

  “Nothing—just that ‘God is up to something’ laugh of his.”

  32

  Justice is truth in action.

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  “Get any shut-eye on the plane, doc?”

  Brian turned to look in the direction of the voice. He recognized its source from the skirmish at the Canadian border.

  “Ward Bennett,” the man said as he approached with a smile, extending a hand, his bright blue eyes concealed behind reflective sunglasses. The wool-lined collar of his leather jacket was pulled up to guard his face, but his cheeks were already turning pink. The early morning sun promised a beautiful day, but it did little to take the edge off the cold outside.

  “A little,” Brian said, shaking his hand, a bit surprised at the power in his grip. “But mostly I just got a headache. I’m not one for flying. And please, call me Brian. Thanks so much for your help.”

  Ward’s trim, muscular build, sunglasses, and flight jacket fit what Brian recalled from Clarise’s brief description of her husband’s background weeks ago, all except for his role as the financial manager of Neff’s enterprise and his jovial manner. He was no desk jockey.

  “I’ve got some aspirin in the car. It’s a pleasure to actually meet you, and you as well, Dr. Carter,” Ward added, taking Melissa’s hand as she emerged from the plane to help her down the short stepladder. “It’s terrible what happened, but we’re thrilled to have you.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a heartfelt smile, adjusting her coat. “We’re grateful. And please, call me Melissa.”

  “Have a seat inside the car; it’s still warm,” he said. “It’s over there,” he clarified, pointing to a hulking Ford Expedition about fifty yards away. “We’ll be on our way in no time.”

  Brian watched Ward chat with Malcolm and Dee as he helped Melissa into the SUV. The pair joined them a moment later. Neff, Malone, and Ward retrieved two suitcases and four cardboard boxes from the plane parked inside the private hangar. Brian was reminded again of how little they’d been able to bring, but he felt blessed to be where he was.

  “Thanks for the lift.” Neff patted Ward on the shoulder as he took a seat behind him. “I know how you like to sleep in.”

  “Right,” he laughed, starting the van. “This was the perfect chance to avoid Kamran’s cooking. It’s his turn this morning.”

  “That was quick thinking.”

  “It’s a gift,” he said, smiling wider. “Got you some coffee inside while I waited,” he added, handing Neff a tall Styrofoam cup with a small plastic baggie containing several pills. “Take ’em now. Clarise will ask.”

  “Thanks,” he replied.

  “We’ll try to be quiet on the way,” Ward joked loudly, snapping Malone on the arm as he tried to find a position in the front passenger seat for a nap on the way.

  “You do that,” the stocky, older man grunted, closing his eyes and snuggling up against the door. “Somebody had to get us here.”

  “Took you long enough.”

  “Maybe if I’d had a better flight instructor.”

  Ward laughed again and pulled out.

  “Actually,” Neff said, turning toward their passengers, “this is a good time to explain the situation with Dr. Bradley and Dr. Harper. It’ll help pass the time.”

  “How long of a drive do we have?” Brian asked.

  “Several hours,” he replied and took a sip of coffee. “We’re out in the boondocks.”

  “By all means, then. I’m dying to hear about it.”

  “So are we,” Dee reminded everyone.

  “Well, the story actually starts months ago, near the beginning of last summer. One of our associates—his first name is Kamran—had struck up a friendship in an online astronomy forum with an astronomer whom we later discovered was a priest at Castel Gandolfo.”

  “The pope’s summer home,” Malcolm observed.

  “Yes—also home to the Vatican Observatory. Have you all heard of that as well?”

  “Yeah,” Brian acknowledged. “Father Benedict told me about it once.”

  “I’m guessing the two of you talked a few times about your published article?”

  “More than a few.”

  Neff nodded. “Kamran will have to relate the specifics, but he and one of the astronomer priests got involved in a discussion about astronomical religious symbolism. It’s a favorite subject of Kamran’s, one that none of us can really follow. He’s very young—he just turned eighteen—but he’s something of a prodigy.”

  “What was the priest’s name?” Malcolm asked, looking at Brian.

  “Why don’t you ask it the way you mean to ask it,” Brian said, anticipating the response. Neff looked puzzled.

  “Yeah, might as well. Was the priest’s name … Mantello?”

  Neff’s expression shifted to amazement. “How did you know that?”

  “We were all with Father Benedict this summer, as you deduced, and that name came up. Andrew discovered that a friend of his had suddenly and suspiciously died. He told us the story and noted that he worked at Castel Gandolfo. I thought I’d take a shot at the name.”

  “Fascinating,” Neff said thoughtfully. “Kamran never got the name of his friend directly. The two of them used aliases online. That’s part of our security protocol. I’m not sure why Father Mantello chose to do it, though. Anyway, the two of them exchanged notes and image files regularly in a secured drop box that we use, but that all stopped without any notification. Kamran was mystified. Weeks went by. He eventually paid a visit to the observatory’s website and found a press release about the death of Father Mantello. He had died the evening of what turned out to be the last communication between Kamran and his mystery colleague. The conclusion was evident.”

  “How did Kamran take the discovery?” Malcolm asked.

  “He was terribly upset. When you meet him, you’ll learn that Kamran can’t actually speak, but he communicates well enough. We use sign language and texting with him. He, of course, hears just fine and has a good command of English.”

  “Why can’t he speak?” asked Melissa.

  “He has no tongue,” Neff said. He couldn’t completely hide his grim tone. “Kamran is an orphan. His father had been a Christian pastor in Afghanistan, but was murdered, along with his mother, by the Taliban. When Kamran refused to renounce his faith, they cut out his tongue.”

  “How awful.”

  “It was. I found him about six months after he was orphane
d on a trip to Pakistan. From what I could learn, he’d been taken there by some relief workers after American soldiers had driven the Taliban out of his home region. That was about six years ago. When we met, he didn’t know English, and I didn’t know sign language, but I felt compelled to take him in. You’ll find that everyone at Miqlat has a history. None of us has led an uncomplicated life. We all know tragedy, but that’s part of what makes us a family.”

  “So how did that involve Malcolm and Dee?” Melissa asked.

  “Kamran wasn’t only emotionally stricken by what happened,” Neff explained. “He’d found—and now lost—a mentor. Like I said, what Kamran is interested in is way over our heads. He felt lost without Father Mantello. Apparently he’d set Kamran on some kind of trail that he didn’t feel competent to pursue without help. I’m still not sure why or what it was. One day Kamran was going through their old messages and came across Father Benedict’s name. I had, of course, heard that name before from Father Fitzgerald. Kamran wanted to make contact, hoping Father Benedict would be able to help him in his research. I contacted Father Fitzgerald about making that happen—and that’s really where things started to veer in the direction of you two,” he noted, looking first at Dee, then Malcolm.

  “You found out that Father Benedict was nowhere to be found,” guessed Dee.

  “Exactly. Father Fitzgerald and Father Benedict were, as we all know, fellow travelers. I’m not privy to all of what they did or got themselves into over the years, but I knew from experience they were both entirely trustworthy. I regularly give money to Father Fitzgerald, both for the college and for his own projects and the people they involve. Father Benedict was involved in several, but I just knew him by name and reputation.”

  “So what happened when you couldn’t contact Andrew?” Brian asked.

  “Father Fitzgerald told me it wasn’t unusual—that Andrew would be incommunicado for weeks at a time. So I had to drop it and tell Kamran to be patient. Two months later Father Fitzgerald contacted me that he’d heard from Andrew, but the brief communication had him out of sorts.”

  “Why?”

  “Andrew confessed that his present mission—he didn’t say specifically what it was—had turned out to be far riskier than he’d anticipated. He mentioned you specifically, Dr. Bradley.”

  “What did he say?” Malcolm asked.

  “He was worried about your future. He wondered if you were, to quote him, ‘going to succeed.’ ”

  “Do you know where that email came from?” Brian asked. He turned to Malcolm. “It’s hard to believe that security would have ever let him send that from the base. The timeline feels like it would have come just before Andrew helped us escape.”

  “I know.”

  “It came from his office at the University of Arizona,” Neff replied.

  “Where he’d been teaching as an adjunct professor,” Brian recalled.

  “Right. What base were you at? And you say you escaped?”

  “We were at a couple different locations,” Malcolm answered. “We’ll give you the whole story tonight—trust me, it’d be a distraction now. Brian and Melissa made it out, but Dee and I didn’t.”

  “I suppose Andrew could have been allowed off the base,” Brian reasoned. “He was part of the Group. He could have made it to his office.”

  “The Group?” asked Neff.

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “Okay, we’ll save that for later,” Neff sighed. “At any rate, Malcolm, neither of us presumed from the email that you were actually with Father Benedict. We assumed Andrew had sent you on some important errand. Father Fitzgerald had told me you were a priest and a scientist, and that you and Father Benedict had a history. We found your MIT email address in the Bcc: field of an email sent to Dr. Fitzgerald a year or so earlier.”

  “Aren’t those invisible?” Dee asked.

  “Not for someone who knows how to get into the stored information. Madison—the young woman you met briefly at the rescue—managed that pretty easily. She’s in charge of all our IT systems and computer hardware. She’s an experienced hacker.”

  “So when you tried to find Malcolm, what happened?” Melissa asked.

  “We found out he was on a classified government project—and also that his initial commitment to that project had been unexpectedly extended.”

  “ ‘Extended,’ ” Malcolm repeated, smirking. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

  “We pressed your department manager at MIT to contact you. We told her it was an emergency. She stonewalled for a week before admitting that the government agency claiming authority over you would be using your services indefinitely. That was just too suspicious for us.”

  “So how did you find me?”

  “On the strength of Father Benedict’s reputation, we decided to treat the situation as an involuntary detention. We brought Nili into the problem at that point. Her background, of course, means she has extensive contacts within Mossad. One of her family members works for Israel’s version of the state department, and that person agreed to inquire about your whereabouts. After a week or so of persistence, that individual produced an interesting reply—that ‘Dr. Bradley and his associate Dr. Harper were fine and hard at work.’ ”

  “Why would they mention me?” Dee asked. “That’s kind of odd.”

  “We thought so, too. People in that line of work are supposed to say nothing with as few words as possible. Our best guess is that it was an error—and a very providential one.” He looked again at Malcolm. “We think whoever replied made the mistake of trying to make your situation sound normal by putting you with some company.”

  “What did Nili think?”

  “She suggested right away that if we ever broke through to whoever was detaining you, we’d try to get Dr. Harper as well.”

  “But how in the world did you pull it off?” Brian marveled.

  “We got Mossad and the Israeli government directly involved,” Neff revealed. “We decided to make a trade, even though it made us feel a little exposed. It was the only way.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Malcolm.

  “To make a pretty convoluted story brief, in exchange for the two of you being brought to Israel, I offered to put up some ransom money for some Israeli soldiers and share some cyber intelligence on Hamas that Madison has gathered in the course of our own work. We told them that we suspected certain elements within the US intelligence community were holding you against your will.”

  “I get the money and the intel angle,” said Malcolm, “but why would Mossad play hero when they knew they’d piss off their US counterparts if they succeeded?”

  “In a nutshell, it was about settling a score,” Neff informed them. “Back in 2010, some people within US intelligence called Mossad our worst intelligence ally and accused the Israelis of stealing secrets. It really insulted them.”

  “Was it true?” Dee asked.

  “Maybe—that’s what intelligence communities do. But that didn’t matter. It was the public nature of the accusation that irked them. Add a string of other insults Washington has tossed in their direction in recent years, like kissing up to the Muslim Brotherhood and warming to the Palestinian cause, and a little payback project like ours didn’t need extraordinary persuasion.”

  “People are people,” Malcolm mused.

  “That they are—and it’s a good thing. The Israelis were able to identify Dr. Harper, though we’re not sure exactly how, and that helped them concoct a scenario that had the Israeli government requiring research services from both of you in Israel for a few weeks. It was all a ruse, of course, and the Israelis knew neither of you would be staying in the country. They didn’t care if you went AWOL after work some afternoon.”

  “That’s incredibly risky,” Melissa interjected. “They had to know there’d be hell to pay if it worked.”

  “Of course. To protect themselves, the Israelis planned to apply some pressure on a few key senators if and when Malcolm and Dee went mi
ssing and whoever was holding you demanded action. Israeli intelligence has dirt on hundreds of members of Congress and other people in the DC establishment. Lord knows some of them make that sort of thing painfully easy when they travel overseas and otherwise behave corruptly. Presumably the Israelis carried through. Once we got you out of the country, we didn’t care.”

  “Now, I have a question for our biblical scholar,” Neff said, looking at Brian with a hint of mischief in his eye. “Did we do the right thing?”

  Brian didn’t hesitate. “I’d have done it. I can’t say for sure Malcolm and Dee were in a life-threatening situation, but knowing their context, that’s a distinct possibility. I don’t believe for a minute Father Benedict wandered out into the desert on his own—and he was part of the whole situation involving Dee and Malcolm. They could have been next.”

  “Yes—we’ll have to chat about poor Andrew later as well. I don’t think his death was accidental either.”

  Brian and Melissa exchanged a pained glance. “But beyond that,” Brian continued, “God uses you and your team to bless thousands. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if God decided to use you as an instrument to punish wicked people now and then. They sow what they reap. ‘Their sin will found them out,’ to use the biblical phrase.”

  “Well said,” Neff acknowledged. “It’s clear you’ve thought about such things.”

  “We haven’t had much choice,” Brian replied with a sigh.

  “We appreciate all the effort,” Malcolm said gratefully, “and the risk.”

  “We certainly do,” echoed Dee. “And if you ask me, we were going to be next. I think we all know by now that once the Colonel is finished with you, you’re expendable.”

  Melissa unconsciously touched her mid-section.

  “I don’t know what they did to me,” Dee added, discreetly avoiding eye contact with Melissa, “but it’s a good bet that when it came time to get what they wanted, I’d have been an inconvenience that needed fixing.”