Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Humming happily to himself, Fremdkunst chipped loose pieces of the stone from which the strange perfume had come. He tapped them gently into specimen vials while, standing over him, George Otis prayed with eyes closed, repeating “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” like a chant.

  Watching them, Retticker had no idea which ritual—scientific, or religious—might be the more appropriate response. He was sure, however, that he had come a long way from where he’d started. A blissful, druglike lassitude settled upon his thoughts.

  This was all beginning to feel like a lot more than just investigating potential soldier-enhancers for tactical advantage. While searching for possible superarmors and perfected unit cohesion, he had somehow stepped onto a battlefield bigger and deeper than he had ever imagined, one whose lines were drawn in ways he did not yet understand, and whose boundaries stretched far beyond his view.

  PROPHECY AND CONSPIRACY

  Jim Brescoll grimaced. The government-issue sedan, of which he was the unlucky driver, was a bucket of sludge when it came to handling the curves of the mountain road. Not that the road, as it climbed into the central Sierra, was particularly tortuous: California Highway 168 was a full four lanes, at least along this stretch of it. Yet the sedan was sloshy on the turns and underpowered on the uphill grade. Ever since global oil production peaked and started on the downslope, nearly all government vehicles were required to be alternate-fuel hybrids, but this one didn’t even have the virtue of being particularly fuel efficient.

  The bright sky and snow on the distant peaks reminded him of another winter trip to California, years ago. He wondered what it would be like to drive this road in a high-powered sportster, with a tight rally suspension and steering package. Or perhaps even taking this highway on a crotch-rocket motorcycle, an adventure of which his wife would never approve—

  His satellite screenphone rang for his attention. He put on his augmented reality glasses and answered.

  Dan Amaral’s mustached and goateed viz, narrowcasting from Israel, appeared in faux 3D in the doubled readout screens in the upper-right corners of Brescoll’s glasses.

  “Hello, Jim. Doesn’t look like you’re in your office, judging by the background.”

  “I’m on the road in California,” he said, thankful that this land yacht he was driving at least had a secure videoconf line compatible with his AR specs. Even that compatibility, however, could not compensate for a chat carried on halfway across the globe. The signal time-lag punctuated their conversation with hanging silences.

  “Ah. Off to meet your mysterious sources inside the mountain?”

  “Right you are.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to be doing any more of the legwork on this. What about Steve Wang and Bree Lingenfelter? This would seem to be up their alley. I mean, you are the director, after all.”

  “Not a ‘red-shirt,’ as my predecessor used to say. I know. But on this one my sources would meet only with me.”

  “Then I hope for your sake they’re not playing ninepin and drinking heavily when you rendezvous with them. Ethan Watson and the administration won’t hold your job open if you get Rip van Winkled for ten or twenty years. Such things happen to people who meet strange folks inside mountains, you know.”

  Jim smiled.

  “I’ll be careful. No bowling with strangers, I promise. How about you? I’ve gotten full reports on the intifadists who attacked the Second Temple’s Western Wall. What about the others? Any progress on those Temple Mount incidents and the dead meteoriticist?”

  Amaral puckered up his face in distaste.

  “Nothing but the clash of fundamentalisms here—‘religious conservative’ Jewish nationalists, ‘religious conservative’ Muslim intifadists, ‘religious conservative’ Christian Zionists.”

  Amaral glanced away. Brescoll guessed he was consulting a PDA or laptop computer.

  “The radical Jewish nationalists were mostly hard-core settlers living in broken-down trailers in the Samarian mountains. Zealots who think the Palestinians are the current incarnation of the ‘Amalekites’—eternal enemies of the Jews the Bible says attacked Moses and his people on the Exodus from Egypt. The Christian Zionists believe the Bible predicts the ingathering of the Jews into a Greater Israel extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. Once the Jews have achieved this Greater Israel, all of them will convert to Christianity—or 144,000 will convert and the rest will be left behind to die in the Tribulation with the rest of us, depending on whose scenario you follow. In either case the Jews will cease to exist as Jews.”

  “I wouldn’t think Jewish Zionists would be particularly happy about the ceasing-to-be-Jews part,” Jim said, trying to rein in the buttcushion sedan’s oversteer on a long curve.

  “No, they’re not. One of those niggling end-time details, where the apocalyptic Jewish and Christian zealots part company. The radical Jewish nationalists have no problem with the Greater Israel aspect, though. They’ve been more than willing to accept the funding lavished on them by their fellow apocalypse addicts in the U.S. The Christian Zionists believe the ingathering and conversion of the Jews signals that all the CZ hopes for the End of Days are about to be fulfilled. Armageddon, Rapture, the Return of Christ to rule for a thousand years on earth—the whole scenario.”

  “And that’s relevant to what’s happening at the Temple Mount?”

  “Right. Members of the Jewish Temple Mount Faithful believe the Torah obligates Israel to rebuild the Temple whenever it becomes possible to do so. Heaven will not send the Messiah as a sign of redemption until there has been a national repentance and the task of rebuilding the Temple has begun.”

  Brescoll nodded, but Amaral seemed to be consulting his research oracles via the Web again, so it took him longer than time lag to continue.

  “Israel gained political control of East Jerusalem nearly fifty years ago now. The main obstacle to the rebuilding is that most rabbis and archaeologists believe the Temple stood precisely where the Dome of the Rock stands today.”

  “I can see how that might present a problem…” Jim said, trailing off as he rounded a bend in the road.

  Around him he saw that, after a long stint among foothill oaks and manzanita, the highway was beginning to rise into heavy pine forest.

  “And how. Many Muslims believe that Jews are already intent on destroying some of Islam’s holiest sites to make way for the Third Temple of the Jewish people, and the fulfillment of the future prophetic program for Israel.”

  “But what do Christians have to do with a Jewish Temple?”

  “That’s a little more convoluted. For some Christians the construction of the Third Temple is an important sign that the ‘time of Jacob’s Trouble’—also known as the ‘Tribulation’—is at hand.”

  “No construction has been done yet, though?”

  “Yes and no. For more than a quarter of a century now, the Temple Institute, aligned with the Temple Mount Faithful, has been creating a ‘Temple-in-waiting.’ They’ve produced ritually appropriate vessels, priestly garments, all the paraphernalia needed for rites and worship at a rebuilt Temple. They’ve also run computerized visualizations and drawn up blueprints for the Third Temple.”

  “An interesting mix of high-tech and ancient tradition,” Jim said thoughtfully, “but I still don’t see how that makes American Christians cough up money.”

  “For certain Christians,” Amaral explained, “all these contemporary physical preparations and political demonstrations by Orthodox Jews point toward a restored Jewish Temple. According to some Christian interpretations of the Bible, a still later rebuilding will be the Messiah’s Temple, which will appear when Jesus comes to reign on earth for a thousand years.”

  Jim shook his head. He was raised Baptist himself, but he’d never thought too much of end-time speculation. A friend of his had once referred to it as Christian sensualism: as a believer, you were strongly discouraged from engaging the services of a prostitute, but you could still fantasize all you pl
eased about the Whore of Babylon.

  The highway he was driving narrowed from four lanes to two, and in more and more places the narrowness of the road-cut reduced the shoulder to nothing. Enclosed on both sides by tall pines, the number and severity of the highway’s twists and turns increased.

  “What about this guy Hijazi who took out Fox? That whole thing sounds way too familiar.”

  “How so?”

  “Like somebody did a cut-and-paste on a couple of pages out of the old Kennedy Curse playbook.”

  “Yes…?”

  “Hijazi’s the silencer,” Jim said, “like Jacob Rubinstein—aka Jack Ruby, the mob-connected nightclub owner—supposedly was.”

  “Conspiracy theory,” Amaral replied, with a wry smile. “About the only thing these Kahanist Jews, Mudayyinist Muslims, and Christian Zionists all agree on is that God plans a terrible war in the Middle East as the kickoff to the apocalypse that’ll cleanse our decadent world of all its evils. They’re all working toward that. Co-conspirators, without knowing it.”

  “The interests of powerful forces do sometimes intersect,” Jim said. “If Ismail Hijazi’s grief and anger were exploited, if he was ‘allowed’ to get past security and express his rage in a way that resulted in Avigdor Fox’s death, then who made straight the way for him? And why?”

  Amaral paused, longer than required by the satellite time lag, long enough to suggest he was giving those questions considerable thought.

  “I think the latter question is easier to answer,” he said at last. “At least superficially. Dead men tell no tales. Who might have set that up, that I can’t say.”

  “Look into it, would you? See if you can’t find out who both Fox and Hijazi might have been meeting with in the days leading up to the incidents at Temple Mount. A good place to start would be with phone records, electronic transfer records, anything that might establish times, places, connections. I’ll have some of my people get to work on the telecommunications and e-commerce ends of it and share with you whatever they manage to find.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll get cracking.”

  “Good. I think I told you about the tip I got on this Avram Zaragosa person. Any word on him?”

  “The meteoriticist whose daughter got suicide-bombed while visiting here,” Amaral said, nodding. “Yes.

  I’ve checked with sources both here and in South America. He’s dropped out of sight. No one appears to know Mister Zaragosa’s whereabouts.”

  Jim pondered that. He didn’t like loose ends, but he’d have to let it go, for now. Too much else to deal with.

  “We need to see whether the Temple Mount situation might fit into the broader puzzle of meteorite thefts worldwide,” he said, “and where all of that might be heading.”

  “You haven’t said much about these people inside the mountain, Jim, but I gather they’re great prognosticators and makers of scenarios…”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I have my sources in your world, too, you know. How about it?”

  “They’re good. Maybe the best.”

  “Ah. ‘If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow, and which will not, speak to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors nor your hate.’ Macbeth. Banquo’s words to the three weird sisters—the witches. Banquo ends up dead, by the way. Murdered. You might want to be careful yourself.”

  “Not that I’ll be meeting with witches or weird sisters, but duly noted. You’re in much more the global hotspot than I am, after all. So take your warning to me and double it for yourself.”

  “I’ll be happy to leave all this behind, believe me. Listening to these people, you’d think the world’s been going to hell in a handbasket for the last five thousand years. I wish it would just get there already—Armageddon tired of the End of the World!”

  Jim groaned at the bad pun.

  “Ouch.”

  Amaral smiled and they signed off.

  As he drove on—more serpentine road-warring through the sea of pines—Brescoll remembered to voice-message Wang and Lingenfelter on the East Coast to share their telecommunications and e-commerce intelligence on Fox and Hijazi with Amaral. When he finished, he saw that, outside the car windows now, there was still snow on the ground at this elevation.

  At last he made his way through the multiple townlet-islands that loosely made up the burg of Shaver Lake. Turning off the highway, he drove past the marina at the northernmost end of the hydropower lake.

  Soon he turned onto a recently plowed private access road, snow-banked on both sides. The road had been previously owned by Southern California Edison but, since the Kwok-Cho affair, it had been deeded over to the U.S. government and administered by Central Security Services, NSA’s military wing.

  As he drove through the parklike pine forests of snow-limned trees marching to the frozen shore of the lake, Brescoll found the road very scenic. It was also heavily surveilled, gated, and multicheckpointed, he knew, though this was his first visit to the Mutual Assured Quantum Cryptologic Security Station, the MAXX.

  At each checkpoint, he slowed and stopped. The identification and biometric security procedures became more involved and redundant. In addition to signing in and presenting his ID badge for scanning and photomatching, he soon had to submit to having his retinas, fingerprints, voice, and DNA printed and matched.

  At the end of it all, he pulled into a cul-de-sac parking lot empty but for plowed-up mounds of snow.

  Before him, oddly free of snow, rose what from the air might have been mistaken for an usually symmetrical, smooth, and pale granite dome. In the days immediately after the Kwok-Cho affair, it had often been mistaken for exactly that. No one was allowed to make that mistake these days, however, because no one was allowed to see it from the air anymore.

  For ten square miles, the atmosphere above the dome was the type of no-fly, off-limits, highly restricted airspace that usually prevailed only over the most secret of defense installations—what military pilots called Dreamlands. True, it could be seen from satellites in space, but from such distant heights it was even more the featureless landscape-feature that presented itself to Brescoll’s eyes now, from less than a dozen yards away.

  Brescoll got out of the car and into the crisp air to take a better look. Surveying it at close range, Brescoll could see that the thing wasn’t made of granite, or rock, or any solid substance, for that matter. From the way it bent the air slightly about its curved surface, Brescoll could clearly see that the thing was a pearl gray dome of force. It sheltered everything for a thousand yards around the actual granite of the mountaintop.

  Brescoll knew that, before the Kwok-Cho affair ran its course, there had been, just about directly in front of him, the mouth of the tunnel that led into the mountain. The road inside that tunnel made its way more than a mile into the rock, and at its end was an automated powerhouse tucked into an artificial cavern. The manmade cave was shaped rather like a loaf of bread, one hundred feet high and three hundred feet long, buried a thousand vertical-feet below the surface of the mountain.

  Under the dynamited and shotcreted dome of this cavern, beneath the granite dome of this mountain, beneath this dome of force, beneath the dome of the sky, something was undeniably going on. Whether what was happening beneath all those domes and rocks was fit for a holiest of holies—or an unholiest of unholies—no one on the outside knew.

  Markham, Benson, and LeMoyne, on the inside, had messaged him that they would know when he had arrived on their doorstep. No secret passwords or codes would be needed.

  For a moment, Jim wished that he weren’t standing here alone, that maybe he could have brought Steve Wang and Bree Lingenfelter along, to lean on their knowledge. Just in case.

  He pushed that thought out of his head. Too late to change things now.

  Although there was as yet no door to be seen, Jim Brescoll stepped forward, hoping to learn how events at the Dome of the Rock, half a world away, might be connected to other domes an
d other rocks.

  CONVOLUTIONS OF HISTORY

  Avram knew something big was afoot when Fremdkunst’s connections suddenly sent in two helicopters.

  The smaller chopper dropped workmen at the Wabar digs, who began putting up more yomes. A much larger heavy-lifter dropped a modular building and installation crew onto the site. No sooner were the workers finished than they were helicoptered out, never to be seen more.

  Although the modular looked like a cross between a double-wide trailer and a temporary classroom, Avram soon learned it was a mobile quarantine laboratory facility.

  Along with Vida and Yuri, he found himself spending less time examining Wabar meteorites and impact glass, and much more time teaching deep-desert survival skills to a half dozen new arrivals. Five of these new arrivals turned out to be high-powered scientists: a pair of biochemists, a pair of molecular geneticists, and a twofer—a binotechnician amply overqualified in both biotech and nanotech.

  Avram found the sixth new arrival more of a puzzle. A bearded and bespectacled young Saudi, he introduced himself as Mahmoud Ankawi. He specialized in the teaching of Arabic, Arab culture, and the comparative religions of the peoples of the Book—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Ankawi had no need of training in desert survival skills—being already expert in such matters, apparently—and he was also an avid amateur meteorite hunter.

  A curious skill set, Avram thought. When he talked with the man, however, Ankawi’s meteorite “hobby” history sounded legitimate enough. He, like so many others, claimed to have gotten involved in his “interest” by looking for coins beneath the sand with a metal detector, before graduating to the sky-iron currency of fallen stars.

  By the time Fremdkunst showed up at camp again, the three senior investigators had more than a few questions for him—especially since he brought with him scores of new meteoritic samples. They had time to ask those questions, too, for the desert was enduring a spate of rain and mud when Fremdkunst arrived—an inconvenient wonder in the Rub’ al-Khali, parts of which see no rain for years on end.