Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “The troubadours came out of Provence, which was also the seat of Kabbalistic learning,” he continued, calling up more sites and blinking them onward through images of poets reading, rabbis praying, and knights battling. “Courtly love poetry, Kabbalism, and Templar influence all moved northward via Eleanor at Poitiers and then through her daughter Marie at Troyes. By the time Chrétien wrote his Perceval, Troyes not only had a strong Templar presence linked to the Middle East, but also a very active Sephardic Jewish community with roots in both Provence and Muslim Spain.”

  “And Grail in Parzival is alchemical, too,” Yuri said. “In late twelfth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach refers to Templars as keepers of Holy Grail, and describes Grail chalice as miraculous stone—as lapsit exillis.”

  “A pun,” Victor said, blinking them through pictures of stones and chalices accompanied by Latin phrases. “It suggests the exiled stone of Matthew—the stone that was rejected by the builders but has become the cornerstone. Perhaps punning on the alchemical ‘lapis elixir’ of the philosopher’s stone, too.

  Transmutation of lead into gold is not so very different from transubstantiation of wine into blood.”

  “Does this writer Wolfram say anything about the stone’s supposed powers?” Vida asked.

  “Quite a bit,” Victor said. “In Parzival, it can supposedly heal and nourish and enrich those who possess it—”

  “Sounds like wish-fulfillment,” Avram said grumpily.

  “Well, why do many cultures wish upon a falling star? There’s some sort of collective folk memory behind that, I’m sure of it. Parzival‘s meteoritic grail even has the ability to communicate its wishes.”

  “Like the Nuhus!” Vida said suddenly.

  “Oh?”

  “When the Mixtecs, the Maya, and the Mexica were describing their meteoritic god-spears in the Mesoamerican codices, they’d had no contact with Europeans, yet the descriptions of the Nuhus’ powers are almost exactly the same as those of the Grail!”

  “A spear that heals and communicates also figures prominently in the Grail stories, too—the spear that pierced Christ’s side,” Victor said, calling up and blinking them through a series of increasingly cryptic engraved illustrations. “There are other puzzle pieces, too. The Black Stone, the Hajar al-Aswad or Hajar al-Fehm—the ‘stone of wisdom’—is set in a corner of the Kaaba. It’s not only Matthew’s but also the Mason’s ‘Cornerstone.’ The stone of the Coalmen, who refer to themselves as the Fehm or ‘Perceivers.’ The stone of the secret Italian society known as Carbonari. The mysterious black ‘stones of power’ in the ships’ ladings of English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher’s 1577 expedition to Baffin Island and beyond—stones most likely meteoritic, and eagerly awaited by Frobisher’s tutor in navigation, the alchemist and magus Doctor John Dee….”

  Avram gave a sour laugh. The others looked at him.

  “Templars, assassins, Grail knights, Kabbalists, alchemists—they’re all doubtless fascinating, but I don’t think there’s much scientific basis to any of this. Remember what I said when we were driving across the desert and this came up, Yuri?”

  “‘That way lies madness.’”

  “Right. Conspiracy theories rush in where historical facts fear to tread.”

  They smiled, but Victor was having none of it.

  “I’m no irrationalist, but sometimes much madness is divinest sense, people. What I’ve seen recently has forced me to be open to unusual possibilities. Just because someone or something is outside the ordinary mind-set doesn’t mean unsuspected patterns might not actually be there. Symbols, metaphors, analogies—they’re all ‘not real’ but they’re also usually connected to some pattern that is real.”

  He sotto voced and blinked them into a welter of alchemical imagery.

  “The lapis as philosopher’s stone is traditionally a symbol and agent of transmutation—not for changing lead into gold so much as for transforming the soul of the human individual into something higher.

  According to the alchemists, their work was the work of the lapis, which was also the work of Christ: to awaken the god asleep in matter. In the Arthurian material, the cup of the Grail that held the blood of Christ is paired with the Spear of Longinus which pierced his side, causing that blood to flow—the bleeding spear that wounds but also heals, and which, some sources claim, had a spearhead of meteoritic iron, the prima materia. As late as the sixteenth century, alchemist Gerhard Dorn was telling his students that the goal of alchemy was that they should transform themselves into living philosophical stones.”

  This time it was Yuri who laughed. The others stared at him.

  “I was thinking of something else you said when first I brought you here, Avri.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Latest great extinction event is us. Human species is now extinction impactor.”

  “See?” Victor said. “That’s it! What we extract from these skystones says as much about us as it says about them. Will we as a species collectively embody the global doomsday rock, or individually embody the ecstatic lapis? The sky is our touchstone—the streak we make across it will attest to our true quality.”

  “Whichever that might be,” Vida said, taking off the AR blinks. “And you still haven’t fully answered my question. What are these labs and all these new samples about?”

  “They are our wake-up call, Vida. Our reveille. Which Rock of Ages are we? My people are gathering together shamanic and priestly ‘power objects’ ranging from Inuit knives made of meteoritic iron to talismanic skystones from Papua New Guinea. We’re building up the chronicle of shamanic and priestly responses to celestial and meteoritic events, just as Miskulin suggested. From all of that we just might be able to extract and put back together what it is that made these things grails in cultures throughout the world. That which wounds the shaman also allows him to heal—himself, and others. The heart of the mystery!”

  Vida stood and walked to the racks of samples and specimens on the nearby shelves.

  “Where did you get all these?” she asked, examining them.

  “I have a not inconsiderable collection, as you may recall,” he said, taking off his AR glasses. “Some newer sources, too. I’m afraid I’ll have to swear all three of you to secrecy on this while our research is going forward.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know exactly what we’ll find. The priests of the old mystery religions believed that what is revealed must be reveiled, or it will be reviled. There’s a lot of truth to that, I think.”

  Vida wasn’t completely satisfied, Avram noticed. As their conference broke up, however, he turned to contemplating the fact that “reviled” spelled backward was “deliver.” He’d always enjoyed palindromes, but in the state of mind in which he now found himself, they were a diversion more pleasant than ever.

  Reviled Eve deliver. Deliver Eve reviled. He was sure he could blink himself to dozens of sites running such mirrorings, if he really wanted to. He thought again of spear and chalice, and wondered why.

  Avram took off his blinks and shook his head, trying to shake his thoughts back into their accustomed patterns. The effect of whatever it was they’d inhaled from Victor’s vial was still very much alive in him.

  His palindromic woolgathering lingered long enough that Yuri and Vida were already out of the lab before he got out of his chair.

  “Avram, may I speak with you before you go?” Victor asked. Avram nodded.

  “I find it interesting that you are so much an unbeliever in conspiracies,” Victor said, “when, as near as I can tell, you are part of one.”

  “What do you mean?” Avram asked, fighting to become more alert despite the lingering effect that breathing the stone’s outgassing, or whatever it was, still had on him.

  “Relax. Let’s just say that I know something of your friend Luis. The one given to wearing panama hats and pale linen suits?”

  Avram said nothing.

  “I don’t know all that much about hi
m, admittedly. He does have interesting connections. I think our specialist in all things Arab and Islamic, Doctor Ankawi, is one of those connections. Perhaps he’s here to help you prepare for your own particular Grail quest? Whatever that might be, I wish you luck.

  Farewell.”

  Before Avram had a chance to ask a single question, Victor was gone. Avram’s many questions, however, did not leave with him.

  INTERLUDE: LAUGHING SOLDIERS, SORRY LUCK

  Dan Amaral regained consciousness to find his arms bound behind him, his head throbbing, and his shoulder crusted with dried blood. He looked around the room. In the harsh light from the ceiling’s bare-bulbed fluorescents, he saw two other men, similarly bound, and what looked to be a metal door with a tiny, wire-reinforced glass window in it.

  Everything came flooding back.

  He’d been following up on the webwork of links surrounding Fox and Hijazi on the run-up to the Temple Mount incidents. He’d promised Jim Brescoll he would do, that before the NSA director himself disappeared on his increasingly extended “leave.”

  The mass of intercepts and general intel sent him by Brescoll’s underlings, Steve Wang and Bree Lingenfelter, had contained a few grains of wheat amid their mountains of chaff, after all. In developing the background of times, places, and connections for Hijazi and Fox, Amaral had noticed an interesting link that even Lingenfelter and Wang had missed.

  Phone intercepts showed a call from Avigdor Fox to Victor Fremdkunst. Electronic transfer records showed a link between Ismail Hijazi and one Hassam al-Wahari, a wealthy financier. Rumors of the dubious provenance of al-Wahari’s personal fortune—money made smuggling guns and drugs across a frontier ranging from the Druze valleys to the Khyber Pass—hung about him like a taint, though the truth or falsehood of such rumors remained undecidable.

  No apparent link existed between Fremdkunst or Fox and al-Wahari, however.

  And then there it was, right next to Dan’s morning cup of coffee and his copy of the English-language Amman Times, with its daily tally of rebel suicide-, car-, and roadside-bomb deaths.

  An enterprising reporter, noting the involvement of a meteoriticist in the Temple Mount incident, had looked back through the paper’s files and found a local connection: Hassam al-Wahari, whose Life/Style Profile a few years earlier showed the silver-bearded millionaire standing in front of his collection of “meteorite art.”

  The reporter had newly interviewed al-Wahari for his response to the Temple Mount incident, which the financier had roundly condemned. Of everyone reading the Amman Times that morning, however, perhaps only Amaral knew enough about Victor Fremdkunst to recognize that the unidentified meteorite art in the years-old file-photo was the work of the master’s hand.

  Dan had made occasional press reports from his various postings in the Muslim world. From those he still had legitimate-enough media credentials. True, the credentials were for his pseudonym—he’d never written those reports under his own name—but editors had been fine with that, since he was giving them real on-the-ground reports, and not just hotel-bar journalism.

  He now made use of his pseudonymous identity in requesting an interview with al-Wahari regarding the worldwide traffic in stolen meteorites. To his surprise, the financier had agreed: “If you can get here, I’ll sit for the interview.”

  “Getting there” was the problem. The predominantly Anglo-American occupation of Jordan—following the overturning of an Islamist coup that had itself overturned the previous elected government—was extremely unpopular with the locals. So unpopular that even the police forces the occupiers had organized to protect Jordanian civil society against the militias were themselves thoroughly infiltrated by Mudayyin militiamen.

  Through Brescoll’s people at NSA, however, Dan at last managed to hook up with the Brits in nominal control of the area east of Amman, where al-Wahari kept his primary residence. British intelligence personnel had gotten Dan a ride in a lightly armored Land Rover with a couple of SAS COPs—Special Air Services Close Observation Patrollers.

  Despite being scheduled to take them through Jordanian militia territory, not far outside the city, the trip was still supposed to be a milk run. Harris and MacGillivray, the special forces boys giving him a ride, were a couple of grimly humorous chaps with the counterterrorism squadron based out of Hereford.

  Dressed in Arab mufti, they delighted in mocking the “yessir, nosir, updown, ticktock” of the regular-army types. They were also well pleased to inform Dan that they had satellite link to top SAS intelligence officers at their UK headquarters in High Wickham.

  “Pretty high-level cooperation, eh?” MacGillivray said, giving Amaral a sly look. “You get that when you’re pilotin’ a carful of explosives.”

  Seeing Dan’s discomfited expression, Harris laughed.

  “Now don’t you worry, sir. Just ‘breaking yer balls,’ as you Yanks say. The noisemakers are real enough, but we promise to get you to your destination in one piece—more or less!”

  The laughter stopped, however, as they approached a Jordanian police checkpoint. The two men grew instantly serious as the policeman demanded identification. Dan handed his press ID to the SAS men, who handed it along with their own to the police officer. The policeman didn’t seem satisfied, however, and signaled to his men to come forward.

  “Look here,” Harris said, “why don’t you gentlemen just give your commander a call? He’s been informed of our mission. We’ve got clearance—”

  MacGillivray cursed under his breath as the police came forward, guns drawn.

  “Balls! I recognize one of ‘em—he’s Mudayyin!”

  Small-arms fire erupted from inside and outside the Land Rover. Harris slammed the vehicle into reverse and smashed the gas pedal, rocketing them backward with such force that Dan was thrown forward against the back of MacGillivray’s seat and flung to the floor of the car.

  He heard two of their vehicle’s tires blow out on the spike plates the police at the checkpoint had laid out behind them—a different kind of bang than the ambient gunfire. Around the corner of the front seat, Dan saw MacGillivray shooting with the heavy handgun in his right hand while shouting for aid and assistance into the satellite phone he held in his left. Harris was similarly multitasking with gun, steering wheel, and shifter—slamming the stick into forward even as he kept firing.

  Dan thought they might actually escape their pursuers when the other two tires blew and they careened into the side of a building. Harris raised his hands in surrender while MacGillivray kept calling for aid on the phone, even as their captors banged opened the doors and dragged them out of the Land Rover.

  One of the policemen, either too adrenaline-pumped or too moved by bellicose high spirits to much consider his actions, slammed Dan in the head with his rifle butt, knocking him out cold.

  “How long have I been out?” Dan rasped to his fellow captives in the bare room, everything seeming somehow blue-green and submarine under the sickly fluorescent. Despite being bloodied and battered, his fellow captives were still quite recognizable as his COP buddies, MacGillivray and Harris.

  “A good long while,” Harris said, spitting out what looked like a piece of a tooth. “We were beginning to worry about you.”

  “Where are we?”

  “In jail is my best guess,” MacGillivray said. Harris nodded.

  “What do you think they’ll do with us?”

  Harris laughed.

  “Full of questions, aren’t you? Depends who ‘they’ are. If it’s just the police, they’ll probably make a big stink with our governments for shooting at officers of the law, but eventually they’ll let us go. If we’re in the militia’s hands, who knows? Shoot us as spies, maybe.”

  At that, both MacGillivray and Harris laughed. Most incongruously, Dan thought.

  He didn’t want to ask any more questions after that. His shoulder stabbed him when he moved wrong—annoyed from whatever laceration or shrapnel had lodged there. His head hurt from concussion, an
d hurt even worse when he considered his predicament.

  He didn’t know whether what had happened was personal or not. Had al-Wahari set him up, ensnaring the two SAS men along the way, purely by accident? If so, had someone higher up influenced al-Wahari to such action? Who might that someone be?

  Or was this all just random bad luck arising from being in the midst of insurgency and asymmetric “low intensity” conflict?

  His boss, Jim Brescoll, had gone missing, and now Dan Amaral supposed that he himself had, too. He felt unprotected, vulnerable, scared. He kept feeling that way until the throbbing in his head and jabbing in his shoulder eased enough to allow him to sleep.

  He awoke to the sound of distant roaring and explosion, followed by shouting and yelling, much closer at hand. MacGillivray and Harris had managed somehow to inch their way up the wall to a standing position, where they waited, quiet and alert.

  A face appeared at the tiny window for a moment, then disappeared. After a moment, a voice commanded “Stand away from the door, please!” in Glaswegian-accented English.

  The door blew inward, and British commandos in desert-urban camouflage swarmed into the room.

  The same man who had commanded them to stand away from the door now called out their names:

  “Harris? Amaral? MacGillivray?”

  When they had each responded, troops cut their bonds and medics looked to their wounds.

  “This got a bit infected,” the young corpsman said to Dan, out of his face-paint, as he examined Dan’s shoulder. “Your head wound is clean, though. Looks like you’ll be going home, sir.”

  Yes. Home. He was glad to be no longer missing—and he was willing to bet that Hassam al-Wahari would no longer be available for an interview. At home, too, there was somebody still missing—someone who would have to be found if he or Dan were going to determine whether what had happened was a plot directed against him, or the mere workings of perverse fortune.