"Es gait nit!" the voice cried in frustration. A man stood atop an ambulance, its lights still flashing, and he stared into the abysmal destruction that lay before them.
As the others carefully exited the bus behind him-the Israeli emergency workers were too focused on trying to see inside the city to notice their arrival from behind-Grant carefully squeezed his way through the growing crowd until he was close enough to the ambulance to see the man on top of it properly.
"You in charge here?" he called out.
The man spun angrily. "Who wants to know?" he replied in English. The flashlight in his hand scanned the crowd until it fell upon Grant, whose hand was raised in the air.
He sucked in his breath and muttered something in Hebrew.
"Let him through! Let him through!" he bellowed through his bullhorn, motioning for Grant to join him.
Grant carefully made his way through the crowd until he reached the ambulance. He climbed the hood and then jumped up onto the top of the vehicle to stand next to the man with the bullhorn.
Grant extended a hand. "I've got thirty able-bodied doctors, emergency workers, and volunteers ready to help. Not counting my team, which is here as well."
The man accepted his hand gratefully. "Jehovah be praised, you have come when our need is gravest. I am Amiel Yishai," he said, offering his hand as a nod to American custom. "It is an honor. I have been placed in charge of the rescue and cleanup operations by my government. But I do not know where to begin. How are we supposed to rescue anyone when we cannot see through this accursed smoke of Jerusalem Stone?"
Grant examined the column of white smoke that lay before them, many miles wide. His thumb rubbed the underside of his ring, back and forth, as he thought.
"Maybe I can do something about that," he resolved.
Can I, really? he wondered. He couldn't manipulate air, but there were so many particles of dust and dirt and ash in this air, maybe he could reach out and ...
Grant swallowed and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and quickly ran through the focusing exercises Daniel had helped him learn. When his mind was at peace, he opened his eyes and looked straight ahead into the fog. He jutted out both of his arms, palms out, toward the smoke that covered the city. The massive sandstorm that covered Jerusalem split perfectly down the middle, breaking forward from the point where Grant stood.
Brow furrowed, heart rate skyrocketing, his breathing became hard and heavy, as he slowly began separating his arms. The sandstorm followed suit, parting in a perfectly straight line before them all.
A powerful gush of wind nearly knocked Grant and Amiel off of the ambulance as air rushed into the vacuum of empty space created by Grant's actions. But he refused to relent, pushing with all his might, until the dust and dirt and smoke and ash were moved far out of sight. It took almost five full minutes, with the roiling clouds threatening to break free from his grip at every turn. But he held the smoke unwaveringly, and every time it threatened to spill over into the gap, he beat it back.
When it was done, Grant bent over and braced himself with his hands on his knees. He was spent and out of breath.
The hundreds of individuals present would have been in awe of his display of raw power had their eyes not inevitably settled on the city the very second the smoke was gone.
Grant finally looked up when sounds from inside the city carried to where they stood. He heard weeping and screaming. He heard the sounds of the lost and confused and dying.
It was remarkably loud, like a crowd the size of twenty football stadiums, all cheering at once.
A vast canyon stood before them as if scooped out of the earth. Dark and boundless, it stretched out much farther than the eye could see. What once had been a hill had collapsed into a bowl. Yet much of the city still stood, even though the ground had pressed so far into the earth-over one hundred feet below the altitude where it had once stood. What buildings remained upright were fractured, broken, and many of them were perilously close to falling over.
The recognizable walls of the Old City stubbornly clung to their foundations, but many of the interior structures had caved in or disintegrated. Many modern buildings elsewhere had fallen, but a few skyscrapers still projected into the night sky. The golden Dome of the Rock, one of the city's most recognizable structures, still gleamed, wholly intact, though it was much too far away from Grant's position to see if the building beneath it remained undamaged as well.
As for her citizens, Jerusalem's survivors could be seen wandering the streets, looking for loved ones or screaming at the heavens, with faces both dirty from soot and soaking wet from tears. Thousands of others simply lay on the ground, sprawled out with arms and legs at rest in unnatural positions.
Grant didn't snap out of his initial shock until someone started shouting behind him.
"This ain't a spectator sport, people!" It was Alex. He turned and saw her stepping forward from the crowd. "People in there need help, and they need it now! What are you waiting for?"
As if awoken from some communal nightmare, the crowd broke and began pouring over the edge of the crater as one. Vehicles rumbled to life and found roads that would take them into the heart of the city.
Grant looked at the Jewish man beside him, Amiel. He'd been weeping silently, agape at the ruined city before him. He glanced at Grant with a fearful, hopeless expression. He merely shook his head back and forth, unable to speak.
"Never surrender to anger or despair," Grant offered, quoting the words he lived by. "Never give up; never give in."
"Our shining pearl of the desert. . ." Amiel whispered. His eyes turned slowly upward until he was facing the heavens. "Why have you abandoned your people when they need you most?"
"Hey," Grant said, a hand placed gently on the Jewish man's shoulder. Grant waited until Amiel looked at him, and he held his gaze confidently.
"Hope lives," said Grant. "And we're going to show this city what it looks like."
Washington, D. C. J. Edgar Hoover Building
"So not only did you fail to apprehend the suspect," Director Stevens explained, "but you allowed him and his associates to hijack a commercial aircraft."
Ethan sighed. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead or dying in Jerusalem, and she's still playing her games?
His recent discovery in the L.A. subway had left him with little patience for Stevens's petty power struggles. And he resented her summoning him here at a time like this. FBI Headquarters was the last place he needed to be.
"It's not accurate to categorize Guardian's actions on the plane as a `hijacking.' Even the pilot is willing to testify to that. By all accounts, he commandeered the plane so he could effect rescue operations in Israel-"
"Cut the crap, Agent," Stevens replied, testy. She was well aware of Ethan's impatience for being here, but she chose to ignore it. She was at this meeting, which featured the same attendees and location as the one a few days ago, ready for a rematch. "Did you or did you not find blood from a murdered LAPD detective on the floor of the warehouse that Guardian and his associates called home? Did he or did he not take control of a commercial flight for his own purposes? And did he or did he not first come to light the same day as the unexplained meteorological disturbance in Los Angeles, by your own account?"
Ethan knew there was no way to come out on top today. This "debriefing" was nothing more than a public dressing-down of him, and he doubted anyone in the room couldn't see that.
But he still had an ace in the hole. He knew Guardian's real name.
Did he dare play that card?
"Yes ma'am, that's factual information. All of it."
"Then let me give you some more factual information, Agent Cooke," her curt voice replied. Ethan wasn't sure, but he thought he almost detected a hint of a purr in her demeanor as she settled back into her chair, relishing the moment. "You are still on the case. But from now on, you're going to do things my way."
Ethan swallowed his pride and managed, "Understood."
&nb
sp; "You will leave immediately for Jerusalem, tracking Guardian's movements there until you have ascertained his true travel intentions. But you will not engage the target under any circumstances. Am I clear?"
"Completely," he replied. "But if I may ask ... his `travel intentions'? Why is that relevant?"
Stevens smiled, anticipating this question and zeroing in for the kill. "You don't understand," she said with clear pleasure. "Guardian booked his flight to England. England, Agent Cooke, not Israel. He booked this flight before the disaster took place in Jerusalem. If it was his intention all along to wrest control of the plane and venture to Jerusalem, then that proves your own theory that he is somehow complicit in these worldwide disasters."
"But," Ethan picked up her line of reasoning, "if he was planning to go to London all along, then that means he knew nothing of the crisis in Jerusalem until after it took place. Which means he's innocent."
"Perhaps," she conceded. "Either way, pressure is increasing from the Beltway to settle this `Guardian question' once and for all. And that is precisely what you are going to do. But now you will do it under my constant supervision."
The first seven hours after the dust had cleared over Jerusalem, Grant and Alex systematically worked their way throughout the city using a borrowed, open-top IDF Jeep. Their vehicle was equipped with a basic medkit, high-beam flashlights, and radios so they could call in help as needed.
Hector rode with them for a while but got on and off so frequently, helping anyone he spotted who was hurt, that they'd been forced to leave him behind after a few hours. There was just too much ground to cover to keep stopping so often. Their task was to focus on the areas of town with the largest concentrations of trapped people and get them out.
Using her empathic abilities, Alex zeroed in on the locations with the most frightened people, and Grant used his psychokinesis to clear away the rubble so that emergency services could come in and offer the victims aid.
Nora joined them four hours in, but soon had to recuse herself from their fast-paced efforts. Grant had never seen her so focused and intent, yet so tremendously vulnerable. Her usual walls were down, and he saw her reach out to many survivors with a tenderness and humility that she'd never displayed before. He knew her remarkable gift would come in handy today, relieving the trauma of many a survivor.
Early on, Grant received permission from Amiel to place all of the rubble that he cleared away in one of the outlying valleys surrounding Jerusalem. It had taken over an hour, but Amiel arranged to have a powerful spotlight shine straight up into the air from the center of the valley, so Grant could find it quickly, regardless of his orientation to it from within the city.
It was taxing work, hefting hundreds of tons of wood, bricks, concrete, and other materials high into the air, and then guiding them in the direction of the spotlight shining so far off in the distance. After several hours of work, fatigue set in, and his eyes tried to convince him that he was seeing the wrong light. But he would always shake the cobwebs away and refocus.
The work proved perhaps most trying upon Alex. Repeatedly, she found it difficult to concentrate because of, as she explained it, the swarm of "intense emotions" surrounding her. The hundreds of thousands of survivors inside the city were overwhelming her senses with pain and sorrow and grief and panic ... And she was having a hard time blocking it all out, which caused pronounced headaches. From how she described it, Grant kept picturing someone trying to tread water in the ocean in the midst of a hurricane. She had to stop every so often just to catch her breath.
Three hours in, Grant had contacted Amiel and asked if he could order his workers-which already numbered in the thousands and were growing all the time-to try and rein in their emotions, just to see if it would make any difference on Alex's senses. It didn't.
On they drove, for hours upon hours. Farther into the heart of the ancient city.
Grant was surprised to happen upon Wilhelm as the sun was rising.
The small man with slicked-back black hair was seated next to an electrical generator outside of a major hospital downtown. He explained upon seeing Grant and Alex that Hector was here also, inside the building, putting his skills to good use.
Wilhelm was holding a pair of wires that snaked along the ground and up inside of the generator. The wires' protective coverings were exposed, and Wilhelm touched them with his fingers. The generator was humming with life, powering the emergency systems inside the hospital.
Or rather, Wilhelm was powering it.
"Until today," he explained, "I never realized that my electrical powers could be put to a constructive use. I thought they were only good for hurting people, and I never wanted any part of that."
He went on to confess that he felt alive for the first time in years, and he couldn't wait to find more ways to help.
Grant was standing at the Jeep, about twenty feet away, and talking to Morgan on his radio, when he saw two children wander out from inside the hospital. A local boy and girl, around four years old, Grant surmised. They were dirty and confused by everything going on around them, not understanding the magnitude of what was happening to their home.
They spotted what Wilhelm was doing and questioned him about it.
Grant saw the man's eyes soften as soon as the children came into his field of vision, and his features radically changed. No longer timid, awkward, or self-conscious, Wilhelm's face was reshaped into something warm and gentle and kind.
The language barrier came between him and the two children, of course, and Grant was tempted to end his conversation with Morgan so he could intervene.
But as he watched, Wilhelm smiled at the children, and they responded in kind. He let go of the wires with one hand and placed his free hand on the little girl's face. His forefinger and thumb spread apart and upward, making her lips curve into a smile. She pulled away and giggled, but then tried doing the same thing to the little boy. Once they'd all tried it, the children looked to him again for another trick.
He took the girl by the hand and placed her palm on his own nose. He coached her into pressing on his nose, and when she did, his tongue popped out of his mouth, as if in response. The girl screamed with delight and clapped her hands. The boy reached out to Wilhelm's nose and tried it too.
Grant and Alex were called away, but as they left Grant watched his new friend in wonder, laughing and playing so calmly and naturally with the two children, until he could see them no more.
Morgan and Fletcher declined the offer of a vehicle and opted instead to set out on foot through the city, looking for survivors that others might miss. Also, they'd been given the task, at Grant's request, of locating Payton.
As the hours passed, they worked their way toward the octagonal Dome of the Rock, led more by Morgan's intellectual curiosity than anything else. The building held steadfast to its foundations atop the Temple Mount, though many of the mosaic tiles on its outer walls had broken free and shattered on the ground. The glistening golden dome itself still stood firmly in place, and remarkably, it didn't appear to have suffered any damage at all.
They carefully made their way up the many stairs that led to the shrine's entrance. When they'd entered the outer door, Fletcher asked, "What?"
Morgan had stopped walking and her eyes were closed. She was perfectly still.
"This place," she replied quietly, reverentially. "It's so rich with history ... The walls themselves whisper to us. Don't you hear it? Don't you feel it?"
Fletcher dutifully listened but heard only ambient sounds of water trickling and rubble breaking free and falling.
"It's overwhelming ..." Morgan said, still lost in her own world. Her eyes snapped open, and Fletcher jumped.
"Did you know that the Dome of the Rock was the original location of Solomon's Temple?" she asked.
Fletcher opened his mouth to respond that yes, he did in fact know that already. But she didn't stop talking.
"On this very ground we stand upon once rested what many believe to
be the single most important historical artifact in human history."
"What artifact?" Fletcher prodded.
"The Ark of the Covenant."
"The Ark of the Covenant? As in, Raiders of the ... ?"
Morgan nodded slowly, smiling. She pointed straight ahead, to the center of the main chamber, where a massive slab of granite rested directly beneath the enormous dome. "The `Rock' the Dome is named for is believed to be part of Mount Moriah, the very location where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac upon God's orders."
Fletcher's eyebrows popped up at this, despite his personal ambivalence toward history.
"There are catacombs, caves, and ancient tunnels beneath this structure that are thousands of years old. Think about that! Tunnels carved into the earth that predate most of modern civilization, and they're still down there, still intact."
Fletcher watched her and waited. He knew her well enough not to interrupt now.
"I don't know what it is, but something about being here, in this place, and knowing who else and what else once existed here as wellright here-it's a profound feeling. It's as if somehow, everything in the universe and every strand of history is connected to us, here, in this moment. We are playing a part in the same history that Solomon and Abraham are part of. We've arrived at the stage, and our curtain call is about to begin."
Fletcher was beginning to understand, even if he didn't fully grasp her level of intuition and emotion. "Are you saying we were meant to be here, somehow?"
She looked upon him for the first time since entering the building. "I want to say yes, but that doesn't feel like strong enough of a word."
Fletcher was pondering this when they heard clanging sounds from deeper inside the building. Following the sounds, they found a teenage boy and girl beyond the building's many internal pillars and supports, standing off to the side of the Foundation Stone. They were stuffing Islamic relics into a large burlap sack.
Fletcher stumbled on a crack in the floor, and the teens were startled. The girl pulled out a pistol and cocked it in their direction, her hand shaking nervously.
Fearless (Dominion Trilogy #2) Page 13