by Rachel Lee
“My lord?”
“As long as you serve me, Avram, and no others, I will keep you and your descendents close. From them I will create a great nation. But for now you must gather your wife, a few servants, a small flock, and only what you can carry. You must head toward the setting sun, toward the land I am preparing for you.”
“Yes, lord.” Avram quivered but hoped the all-seeing eyes of his lord would not perceive it.
“Go, Avram. And take upon yourself the new name of Avraham, as you will be father of a new race. But remember, Avraham, honor no other lord before me!”
The implied threat was perfectly clear to the newly named Avraham, descendent of the first adama, as were all his kind. “So it will be.”
“It is well.” Enlil stepped close. “After you have left Ur, I shall bestow a gift upon you. It will be a new language, Avraham, the language of creation. I will give you a secret book that you must keep and pass along as your birthright, for in it will be great power. This book we call the Kabbalah. I will tell you later how I wish you to use it, but for now let none know you possess it.”
Avraham shivered. “Yes, lord.”
“But before you go, I will give you something equally precious, something you must guard for me with your life.”
At that, Enlil gestured to a plain box lined with gold. Except for the lining, it might have been any wooden crate used for transport. “Come and see.”
His knees feeling weak, Avraham moved tentatively toward the box. As he approached, four shimmering gems stunned his gaze. Ruby, emerald, sapphire and diamond, they glistened as if light resided within them. They were shaped a little like the ziggurats the adama built to adorn their cities, but flatter and with smooth sides. Indeed, he could see that all the sides were equal.
The light shining from them dazzled him and filled him with much wonder.
“These,” said Enlil, “are the most precious stones of creation. They contain the power that gave life to the adama, and much more besides. They also contain the power of great destruction, if handled wrongly. The book I spoke of, the Kabbalah, is the key to all the power and knowledge these contain.”
Avraham swallowed hard.
“You will take them with you so that none can use them in the coming war. You will be the guardian of their light, Avraham, and upon your shoulders will rest the protection of your race, for if you let these come into the wrong hands, you and your kind will vanish forever.”
Avraham dared to look at his lord Enlil, his mouth open with both horror and astonishment.
“Be obedient to me always, and I will watch over you. That is my promise to you and yours. But you must keep your bargain, Avraham.”
“I will. I swear I will.”
“Then it will be as I have said for you. I will forever watch over you. But never forget that I am a jealous master.”
Avraham was still shaking as he left the presence of the Lord Enlil. He could not grasp all that was happening, but he was clear about what he must do. And he would obey.
4
Tel Aviv, Israel
Present Day
N athan Cohen did not like to remember his past. To this day, every night, he said the prayers of repentance for his many missions into the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, and even Europe, where his orders had been to infiltrate, identify, terminate and escape undetected. He had been very good at his job.
But his job had been evil. At the time, he had told himself he was serving the greater good, eliminating threats to his homeland and his people. He had believed that by killing some, he was saving many others. These beliefs had enabled him to press detonator buttons, pull triggers, slip knives under ribs, snap garrotes around necks.
He had long since abandoned such self-serving platitudes. He had been a killer, no more and no less. The stain of every victim lay on his soul, and only God could decide whether what he had done in the years since was worthy of mercy.
His transformation—what he hoped was his redemption—had begun in the rugged foothills of Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily, in a small town called San Fratello. He had been dispatched to assassinate an Iranian scientist who, he had been told, was a key figure in Iran’s nuclear program. Publicly, the scientist had been on holiday with his family in Sicily. Privately, he had been meeting a Russian expatriate who was training him in the theory and techniques for producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Nathan had planned carefully, expecting the scientist to leave his wife and two children in the hotel and slip away for his nightly assignation with the Russian woman. Thus, he had not activated the car bomb until sunset, when he saw the lights in the vacation cottage wink out.
Instead, the scientist had opted for a late-night drive to show his family the impressive glow of a volcano venting the energy of the earth into the night sky.
It was not the first time Nathan’s actions had killed innocents. Indeed, he might have steeled himself against it that time, had he not spent the day in the guise of an automobile repairman, chatting with the man’s son about whether the Iranian national football team could earn a spot in the World Cup finals. As they had chatted, the boy’s face had lit up with hope for his country. For him, the world was no bigger than a football, twenty-two pieces of leather stitched around a rubber bladder, yielding magic at the touch of skilled feet.
It was ironic, Nathan had thought at the time, that the boy’s father was equally transfixed by the geometry of a football, albeit for a far different reason. For it was that same geometry, fitted together in high explosives around a radioactive core, that created a darker magic: the cruel power of a nuclear bomb.
That night, as Nathan watched helplessly, unable to deactivate the car bomb as he saw the Iranian scientist and his wife and son laugh as they climbed into the car, the true horror of his profession slammed into his soul with the fiery force of three kilograms of plastic explosive.
Nathan Cohen had not killed since. And, if there was indeed a merciful God, he would never kill again.
Now, spurred by the news that poured from the television before him and the bank of four laptop computers on his desk, Nathan opened a small leather pouch and dipped his finger into the fine white powder within it. Touching the powder to his lips, quietly mouthing the sounds of a series of Hebrew letters, he reached out into the minds of Steve Lorenzo and the other Guardians of Light.
It was a risk, but a risk that must be taken.
For Nathan Cohen knew how Karl Vögel had died.
Rome, Italy
The Rome night had turned blustery and wet. Pavement, some of it dating to the reign of the Caesars, glistened under streetlights. In this part of the city, at this time of night, the few people who were out paid no attention to Lawton Caine. Out here, he was just a warehouse worker, strolling along in worn pants and a battered jacket, seeming but one step away from the homeless who slept under lean-tos and in alleys.
A few streets further on, there were more lights and a different kind of person strolling. Through windows he saw people sitting at tables, sipping wine, laughing, some eating the late meals that were so common in Mediterranean cultures. Finally he came to the piazza, where he could use his cell phone without the signal being traced back to the warehouse in any way. The call to Miriam clicked through in less than seven seconds.
“Anson,” she answered briskly.
“Are you on your way home yet?” he asked.
“Not likely,” she said. “I just finished a briefing. Maybe in a couple of hours.”
“How good is your source in Germany?”
“I couldn’t ask for better.”
From Miriam Anson, that was high praise indeed. Lawton knew her personally, for she had been his mentor at the FBI. He had watched her career blossom after missions in Guatemala and then, at his bidding, in Idaho. He also knew, from other contacts, that her skill and tenacity were the stuff of whispered legends in the U.S. intelligence community. He was not surprised that she had risen to the post of
Director of National Intelligence.
“I’m supposed to find out what you know,” Lawton said.
“Chancellor Vögel had enemies,” she replied. “Some he made just recently. I’ve heard rumors that he’d threatened to pull Germany out of the EU. But you’re closer to that than I am.”
She didn’t need to ask the question directly. Lawton knew she was expecting him to share, as well. “We’ve heard that, too. Nothing confirmed yet, however.”
“Lawton?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re getting chatter, a lot of it. It’s not solid, and we can’t trace it to sources, let alone confirm it. These people have gotten much better at hiding their tracks on the information superhighway. But what we’re hearing suggests things there are about to get worse. Much worse.”
“Wonderful news.”
“Remember what you used to say when it was your turn to talk to school kids? The warning you always gave?”
“I do,” he said. If a man is frightened enough, he will sell his soul for even the illusion of safety. “Is that what’s going on here?”
“Like I said, I can’t confirm anything yet. But the chatter we’re getting, what we can read of it, is talking about preparations for major outbreaks of violence. And it’s odd.”
“Odd how?” he asked.
“It doesn’t read like the preparations of street fanatics,” Miriam said. “It’s more organized. The tone is almost…bureaucratic.”
“Government?”
“Not quite,” she said. “But not far from it, either. Like I said, it doesn’t fit any of the known players, and we can’t source it. Maybe that’s what bothers me most of all. It’s something new.”
“Why is it that ‘something new’ is almost never a good thing in our business?” he asked with a bitter laugh.
“I don’t know, but you’re right. Stay safe, Lawton.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
Then she was gone.
A chill passed through him. Miriam’s tone left no doubt that she believed this was much bigger than a single assassination. Vögel’s death was the opening salvo. But to what end?
Shaking himself to ward off the feeling of evil that was trying to creep into his bones, he headed for a trattoria that the office often used for takeout. The minute he showed his face, they would start packing the boxes, smiling, talking in sputtering, mixed Italian that Lawton was only now learning to follow, knowing exactly what he and his colleagues preferred.
It didn’t matter a damn to Lawton that they were Muslim. They made good food at a reasonable price and never tried to overcharge him. What did their religion matter? And why couldn’t sensible people grasp that?
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
“We can find nothing,” the doctor said as he stepped into Ahmed Ahsami’s office with the last of the MRI films. “I wish I were as healthy as he was when he was examined.”
“But not as dead as he is now,” Ahmed said.
“No. Not that.”
Ahmed Ahsami sat in the predawn darkness, lit only by the pale light of his dimmed computer screen. The news out of Berlin had gone sparse after the confirmation that Vögel was dead. No official cause of death had been given, nor did Ahmed expect one in the next several hours. Had the cause of death been obvious and innocent—a heart attack or stroke—it would have been announced when the spokesman had confirmed the news. No such announcement had been given, which meant that an autopsy was probably under way at that moment.
As the operational director of Saif Alsharaawi, the Sword of the East, a group formed to bring unity and stability to the Middle Eastern nations, it was Ahmed’s job to know what was happening in the world’s halls of power, especially if it might impact Muslims. In the past months, French-born European Commission President Jules Soult had made it clear that Europe would not remain a benign-if-neglectful haven for Muslim immigrants. In the wake of train bombings in Madrid and London, and the ricin gas attack in Prague and a wave of reprisals by angry Europeans, Soult had proposed the forming of “pacification zones” throughout Europe.
While Soult spoke of protecting innocent Muslims from the increasing mob violence, Ahmed had no illusions as to Soult’s agenda. The Islamic pacification zones—within which Muslims must live and work in exchange for increased police protection for their homes and businesses—would be ghettos at best. And they might well set the stage for something far more sinister.
A minor prince in the House of Saud, gifted with a keen intellect and groomed for leadership from an early age, Ahmed Ahsami was an educated man. He had earned a law degree at Oxford, an MBA at Stanford and a fellowship at the prestigious Institut d’études politiques de Paris. But his education had not ended with his formal schooling. Ahmed was an avid student of history, both eastern and western, which he believed was the most reliable lens through which to view the present and predict the future. It had forced him to look past the Wahhabist Sunni tradition in which he had been raised and that sometimes put him in a tenuous position.
“This is not good news,” Ahmed said. “Vögel was our hope. Now there will be chaos.”
“Perhaps you are too much a pessimist?” the doctor asked. “Chancellor Vögel was but one man.”
“And so were Gandhi and Hitler,” Ahmed replied. “One man can enable great good or great evil. All of Europe used Nazi Germany as a means to shed its Jews, both during the war and after, in the creation of Israel.”
“The state of Israel was an act of guilt and mercy after the Holocaust,” the doctor said.
Ahmed laughed bitterly. “That is the common myth, my friend. The truth is that Europe’s leaders also wanted a dumping ground for those few Jews who had survived. They were solving their ‘Jewish question’ as much as assuaging their guilt.”
“And to do so, they violated the will of Allah,” the doctor said.
“Westerners do not read the Qur’an, Dr. Massawi. Those who do, read it only as literature, without faith. They do not care that the Prophet forbade the existence of non-Islamic states in Islamic lands.”
“But were the Palestinians not partly at fault for that, Ahmed? After all, they welcomed Jewish immigrants under British rule. They approved the partition agreement. Should they not have objected then?”
“Perhaps,” Ahmed said. “But they believed the British withdrawal would leave the Jewish territory a protectorate, under an Islamic Palestine. A sovereign protectorate, to be sure, but a protectorate nonetheless.”
The Prophet had been clear as to the rights and privileges of such peoples. So long as they paid their taxes and lived peaceably, the Jews would have been free to practice their religion, allowed to govern themselves and entitled to full citizenship in the Islamic state. Islam was a faith born in the harsh desert, and the duties of host to guest were strict and sacred. The Prophet as well as ancient tradition decreed that to shun a guest who came in peace—to refuse food, water, shelter and protection for his family and livestock—was a grave sin.
“But the Jews demanded more,” Massawi said. “As they always do.”
“Do not judge too harshly, Doctor.”
Ahmed had spent enough time both in the West and in Israel to understand why such an arrangement would have been a slap in the face to the Jewish settlers. Although they would not have been compelled to observe shari’a—Islamic law—neither could their government or its courts have directly violated the law of the Prophet.
“Palestine is the home of three great faiths,” Ahmed said. “None would lightly bear the yoke of another.”
Massawi shook his head. “Then there is no choice but the extermination of Israel? I cannot accept that, Ahmed, and I know you do not accept it, either.”
“No,” Ahmed said. “I do not. Now the burden lies with enlightened and merciful imams. They must reinterpret the words of the Prophet—peace be upon him—so that even a Jewish state is entitled to protectorate status, so long as the Israelis foreswear making war against their Arab neighbors.”
“And do you think Israel would offer this?”
“Yes,” Ahmed said. “I do.”
Long since worn raw by the Palestinian intifada, and scolded by the Western world for the brutality of its most recent incursion into Lebanon, Israel seemed willing to make and honor such promises. Ahmed believed the Islamic states—including his own House of Saud—would be foolish not to respond in kind.
“The Jews are an industrious people,” Ahmed continued. “We are cousins under Abraham. We should be working with them to build a prosperous and humane Middle East, instead of spilling each other’s blood.”
“You are always the dreamer,” Massawi said with a sad smile. “The Israelis do not trust us. They and their Western supporters see us as little more than wild dogs.”
That was sadly true, Ahmed knew. After sixty years of nearly constant war, most often begun by attacks from their Arab neighbors, the Israelis were justifiably suspicious of Arab promises of peace, even if the Arab nations had the united will to offer them. Worse, such a united will did not exist.
Oil, the envy of the rest of the world, was the bane of the Islamic states. For the profits from oil were enough to allow Arab rulers to maintain lavish lifestyles with little need for, and less allegiance to, their own people. The gap between the people and their rulers had yawned into a chasm over the past century.
Worse, the rise of Wahhabism and the even more extreme Salafism in Sunni Islam, coupled with the ascendancy of the Shi’a in Iran and Iraq, had turned the Islamic world into a powder keg. Ahmed often thought the differences between the sects were no more than the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, but like those two religions in the past, the conflict between Shi’a and Sunni Islam had provided a dangerous flash-point for thirteen hundred years.
And that was where oil created an additional problem. The Shi’a were a majority—often a substantial majority—in many of the region’s most oil-rich areas: Iran, southern Iraq, eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Yet until the American invasion of Iraq, only in Iran were the Shi’a allowed a political voice. In the rest of the Middle East, the Shi’a were either an excluded minority or—worse—an oppressed majority.