“I told you before we have fun in ways the old-time Bedu could not imagine,” Umar said, handing Avram the goggles. “This is what I mean. Here. Put these on.”
As Umar and his friends whistled their birds off down the wind, Avram put on the eyegear. He was surprised to find that the goggles were telepresence gear, but even more surprised to discover the point of view from which he was watching the world through them.
He had a literal bird’s-eye view, and that bird was Umar’s female saker falcon, on the hunt.
It was a dazzling and dizzying experience, just to hang suspended in the air like that. The view became even more impressive, however, as the falcon rose in a widening gyre, tracing a labyrinth in the air.
Suddenly the hurr spotted a bustard and started into a stoop, the ground rushing up at much more than a hundred miles an hour, the bustard darting and weaving in a brief aerial dogfight, wild maneuvers arising from its wild attempts to dodge the oncoming feathered bullet, then at last the crack of impact as the hurr hit her target—
“Wow! This is great!” Avram said. Once the hurr stood crouched on her target, he handed the telepresence goggles back to Umar.
“Nano-optical feed,” Umar explained. “Years ago, people began implanting falcons with microchips in their chests to identify the birds and their migration routes. Then someone got the idea of using the falcon’s eyes as optics for telepresence. Some Western people go so far as to put implants in their falcons’ brains, so they can control them like RC cars or planes.”
One of Umar’s friends, overhearing, spat and began a disparaging rant about how everything started going to hell once the Qataris put those little Swiss-made, remote-controlled titanium robot-jockeys on the saddles of their racing camels, in place of the young boys who had traditionally served in that role.
Umar nodded throughout, until he finally cut the man off.
“We do not do that. We like to look through our birds’ eyes, but not control their minds. These birds are our heritage. We do not use them so much to hunt our food anymore, but their freedom is still part of their beauty, to us.”
Avram found that he was absently rubbing the back of his neck. He quickly stopped doing so. This talk of implants seemed to have the power of suggestion, at least for him. He hoped that was the only unconscious power his own implant had on his mind. He, too, appreciated the beauty in freedom, especially his own.
As the sun set, they enjoyed a Bedouin feast of houbara bustard and hare, and much Bedu talk of birds, freedom, and heritage. They were getting ready to break camp when a helicopter came arrowing in low through the twilight, ruffling the feathers of even the falcons behind glass in their four-wheel-drive palanquins.
Once the helo landed, Avram and Vida recognized the man who jumped out of the machine and came striding, bent over, toward them.
“There’s emergency,” Yuri Semenov shouted to them. “Attack on Dome of Rock, in Jerusalem.
Considerable damage. Fremdkunst wants to meet with you both, for safety reasons. Right now.”
“How did you find us?” Avram asked.
“Activated frequency on GPS PLBs—personal locator beacons Fremdkunst makes us wear.”
“But why our safety?” Vida asked. “Who attacked the Dome?”
“Early reports say ex-American Israeli settlers connected to Kach-movement Kahanists and Christian Zionist end-timers. Others say Arabs blew up own holy site to unite Muslims in war against Israel.
Fremdkunst says meteoriticist also perhaps involved, so safety concern for us.”
As they headed for the helicopter, Avram was already thinking about the Dome of the Rock, racking his brains for everything he knew about the Temple Mount. Most of all, however, he feared that security, heightened in response to the Mount events, would make his own mission to Mecca all the more difficult.
Events are about to break in Jerusalem, Luis had written. How had he known?
In his mind’s eye flashed the falcon’s-eye view of the target bustard dodging and weaving. For all the bustard’s maneuverings, however, the bird of prey had nailed it from air to ground. Avram found that thought strangely reassuring.
FOUR
HILL OF BEANS
Images from a thousand miles away cast a pall over the final day of the ECOL gathering. Pictures of the smoke-cloud from the Dome of the Rock billowed up on every screen, followed not long after by another cloud—more smoke and flames, this time billowing from a counterblast’s explosion and fire at the Western, or “Wailing,” Wall of the Second Temple.
If there were any silver linings to the dark clouds of the situation, Michael thought, it was that neither the Dome nor the Wall were as severely damaged as either might have been.
Susan couldn’t bear to watch it. She was still dutifully attending the remaining panels and lectures of the conference—more out of avoidance of the news of the world than anything else. Michael, fearfully fascinated, was glued to any news about the disaster from any screen he could find, so much so that he was giving the rest of ECOL a pass.
The same pall darkened the informal interview he had scheduled with Darla Pittman. Her response seemed to be somewhere between his own fascination and Susan’s avoidance. Darla’s mind was clearly somewhere else—much nearer Jerusalem—and the interview, in the quiet bar off the Burj Al Arab’s main lobby, was perfunctory in the extreme.
Sitting beside her, in tall chairs at a high table, he didn’t know whether to stay or go. So he kept drinking.
Whenever he turned away from the news reports, however, even he couldn’t help noticing the furtive glances being tossed their way—most particularly at Darla.
“They took the Beth El!” a man said to his female companion at a table nearby. Michael recognized them vaguely as conference attendees.
“If that’s true,” said the woman, “there’ll be riots, or worse.”
“And all because of her and her crazy ideas!” said the man, staring in their direction, speaking just loud enough to make sure he would be heard.
The woman shushed him, but the barb struck home. Michael pushed back his chair, intending to go over and confront the guy, but when he saw the way Darla winced it stopped him.
It was all over the breaking news. Avigdor Fox, the meteoriticist taken into custody during the incident at the Dome, had apparently been obsessed with Darla’s work on the Beth El, or “Gate of Heaven.” Copies of her articles, much annotated and decked with marginalia, had been found in a raid by security forces on Fox’s apartment. Darla was feeling the heat of Fox’s involvement, all right.
Michael was torn. If Darla was connected somehow to the tepui assault, then she might already be a party to genocide. Who was to say she might not in some way also be deeply connected with what had happened in Jerusalem?
Yet, as they pored over reports together in the English-language Dubai Times and on the small flatscreen monitor mounted in the table’s surface, he did some furtive glancing of his own. Darla seemed so genuinely distressed by what had happened that he felt more inclined to comfort than to castigate her.
“It says here,” he began, putting his arm lightly around Darla’s shoulder, to reassure her, “that, according to an ancient Semitic tradition, ‘the bare rock atop the mount was held in the mouth of the serpent Tahum and was the intersection of the underworld and the upper world.’ And here: ‘Other traditions hold it’s the site where Abraham built an altar on which to sacrifice his son Isaac.’ See? Lots of interpretations of what the place means. Why should any of them concern you?”
Darla shook her head, frowning.
“Thanks for trying to distract me, Michael, but you know as well as I do it’s not that. Read on.”
“What? ‘Others say the patriarch Jacob used a stone from that same site as a pillow. Upon waking from his famous dream-vision, Jacob anointed the stone pillow Beth El, with oil he received from heaven. Then the stone sank deep into the earth, to become the foundation stone of the great temple that would later be
built by Solomon.’ So?”
“Oh, quit dancing around it, Michael. Here: ‘Scientists have weighed in on the site’s significance, too, most notably meteoriticist Darla Pittman, who claims that the stone which induced Jacob’s dream was a meteorite.’”
It was a no-win situation for Miskulin. In the end he said nothing, only nodded his head in the affirmative.
“Some who have read my work,” Darla said, “don’t seem to be above crashing the Gate of Heaven.”
“He was a researcher of only minor note, Darla. More an adventurous collector than a real meteoriticist, even worse than me! Maybe he was crazy enough to think this was his ticket to the big show.”
“No one sets out to be a minor meteoriticist,” she said with a sad smile, leaning a bit more heavily against him. “No more than someone sets out to be a minor poet, or a minor painter.”
Almost before Michael was aware of doing so, his arm had moved down her body and was around her waist.
“So, maybe, after reading what you wrote,” Michael said, his voice a bit more slurred with alcohol than he’d expected, “someone tried to extract rock of the celestial dome from the celestial Dome of the Rock.
That’s still not your lookout.”
“And why not?” she asked, turning more fully into him, seeming more than a little grateful for the companionship.
“We just put the ideas out there, Darla. We aren’t responsible for how others interpret them, or what they might do based on their interpretations.”
As she looked up into his eyes, everything about her seemed so open and willing. The sometimes hostile distance between them, the years since their ice-blue love affair in Antarctica—all seemed to sublime to merest vapor in the heat of the moment. The remembered taste of her lips flashed with dreamlike vividness into his mind. He would have kissed her right there had he not seen, out of the corner of his eye, Susan approaching the bar from some distance away.
Instantly Michael’s hand was off Darla’s hip, his arm away from her waist. Hand raised, he waved for Susan to see him, to come over and stand with them at their awkward high table. As Susan approached, he wondered how much she had seen, and how she might interpret it.
Darla, her expression somewhere between inscrutable and obtuse, played off what just happened between them as if it hadn’t happened—so flawlessly that Michael wondered if anything had actually occurred.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Susan said neutrally, “but I was wondering if your interview was finished.”
“I’d think we’re finished for now—Michael?” Darla asked.
“I think so.”
“Well then, Doctor Yamada, I know it’s hard to think about something like a job interview at a time like this, but if you’re up for getting it done, we’ll do it.”
“Thank you, yes. Just so long as we don’t have the news monitor on in the table, and I don’t have to watch it on the screen,” she said. Darla politely blanked the tabletop news feed as Susan moved her chair around, to sit with her back to the bar’s larger hanging screen. “Oh, and Michael, I took a call from your uncle Paul on the satellite phone. Sounded important. You should probably call him ASAP.”
“I will,” Michael said, trying not to appear too abrupt as he moved away from the table. “Bye for now, Susan. Darla.”
As he walked away, he wondered how the interview between Susan and Darla would go. All very professional and impersonal, no doubt, despite the informality of the setting. Who knew what might be going on beneath the surface of that businesslike veneer? He hoped he hadn’t provided grounds for too many subtexts.
Then he thought of how perfunctory his own interview with Darla had been, in the face of the growing world crisis, and realized he was thinking too narrowly. He thought of Bogart’s Rick, in Casablanca, saying how the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans, and he smiled.
In an alcove not far from the elevators, Miskulin grabbed one of the Burj Al Arab’s satellite secure-phones, put in a call across the world on it, and charged it to his room. Paul Larkin answered almost immediately.
“Ah, Michael, glad you called. There are some fascinating things happening here. Your friend Brescoll has been in touch. And with these young people you left in my care…just some amazing things going on.
You and Susan need to get back here at your earliest available opportunity and have a look-see. Got it?”
“Will do, Uncle Paul. Susan will be particularly glad to hear it. She thought you were putting us off a bit, not letting us see them before we flew out here.”
“Nonsense. I was just being sensitive to the fact that you two had your itinerary too crammed already.
When do you fly out?”
“Tomorrow morning. I don’t remember exactly when we’re scheduled to land in San Francisco—datelines, and all.”
“No problem. Beam me your updated itinerary and I’ll have a helicopter waiting to shuttle you out here from the airport.”
They said their farewells then and Michael made his meandering way back through the lobby. Looking in on the bar he had left only a brief while earlier, he saw that Darla had left and Susan was sitting alone, nursing a drink. Michael tried not to think how unlike her that was as he sidled up next to her.
“What’s the word from your uncle?” she asked as he sat down.
“He requests our presence ASAP. Wants us to see the kids’ wonderful progress.”
“About time.”
“How’d the interview go?”
“Pretty well, but short. She seemed preoccupied.”
“The Jerusalem crisis is weighing on her—more than on the rest of us.”
“Maybe so. She had a meeting scheduled with her postdoc, too. Barry somebody. I guess I have the job, if I want it. Same with you?”
Michael nodded, then looked at her more carefully.
“You don’t look particularly celebratory about it, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
She looked at him as if she were about to say something pointed, then turned away and spoke to her cocktail glass instead.
“Do you remember the psychoanalyst who presented at that interdisciplinary conference we attended in San Francisco? The one who said that, psychologically speaking, the essence of the scientific method is paranoid alienated voyeurism?”
“I remember how bogus I thought that idea was,” Michael said with a smirk.
“Maybe. But what we’re doing for Brescoll feels like scientific investigation gone bad.”
“How so? I thought you were the one who was gung ho on all this, when we had that little meeting at the museum.”
“I don’t like to be in situations where I have to constantly worry about whether I can trust the people I’m talking to. With Darla, for instance. I was wondering if she was being too lax, considering I was interviewing for some kind of top-secret work. Then I thought maybe she’d already done a thorough background check. So then I wondered what her ulterior motives might be in hiring me. Or in hiring us.”
“That does sound paranoid,” he said, trying to laugh it off.
“Yeah, but I don’t like having to hide things from people. Or wondering whether they’re hiding things from me. You know?”
Mainly to give his hands something to do, Michael activated the flat screen mounted in the table. Reports from Jerusalem continued, images of a golden dome scorched black on one side, and of an ancient wall charred by recent fire.
“…subsequent violence by the Al-Jafari Freedom Brigades,” the newscaster intoned, “claiming in an e-mail message to Islamic television and radio outlets that the attack on the Western Wall was only a first response to the brutal attack on the Dome of the Rock. Meanwhile, the State of Israel has condemned the Dome attack as an act of terrorism. Most of the attackers appear to be Israeli citizens, however….”
Michael switched off the sound, then gestured at the destruction.
“That’s the way the world works, much of the time.”
“Mayb
e. Or maybe that’s the work we’ve made of the world.”
“And quite a piece of work it is,” he said with a chagrined smile. Yet as Susan turned back to her glass, Michael couldn’t help wondering whether her talk of secrecy and mistrust had more to do with the small world of personal relations across a single bar table than with the big world of international relations they saw on the screen.
INTERLUDE: FOXHOUNDS, FOXHUNTER
Three police officers Avigdor hadn’t seen before opened the door to his cell. Armed with submachine guns, they marched their manacled and chained prisoner down the detention center’s long hallway.
“Where are we going?”
“You’re not going to be our problem anymore, Doctor Fox,” said one of the men. “You’re being transferred to the custody of the Israeli Defense Forces.”
The man looked at him as if he expected Fox to start shaking in fear, but Avigdor actually felt strangely relieved. He had been doing a lot of thinking. He had screwed things up royally, but maybe, just maybe, he might live long enough to tell the truth and set some things right, in the end. At the very least, if he told the right truth at the right time to the right people, he might be able to take down with him some of the powerful men who had led him into this maze.
He had taken unusual risks and beaten the odds before, to locate and recover unusual meteorites. Yet he had never gotten the recognition his discoveries deserved. Always the praise had gone to well-spoken media darlings like Michael Miskulin. The powerful men who’d brought him in on this had known what he wanted. They snared him with the promise of meteorite hunting on a remote mesa in South America—the sort of adventure he most preferred, and one that might at last make him the front-page phenomenon he had so long desired and deserved to be.
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