The Falcon and His Desert Rose

by George R. Lasher

  ~~~

  On the top row, at the opposite end of the stadium, a tall, powerful looking, bald, black man wearing a khaki jacket, shirt, and slacks stood quietly, waiting for the end of the ambassador’s speech. His eyes burned with purpose, narrowed in deep concentration. His brow furrowed. While he harbored great respect and a certain affinity for the man who spoke, he felt nothing but contempt for the speaker who would follow. Concealed in his pocket, he held a remote detonator the size of a small cell phone from the early 2000’s, before nano-technology made watch-phones and mandible bone implanted jaw phones possible.

  His strong fingers caressed the smooth sides of the gray plastic gadget. A short, black, rubber-coated antenna protruded from one end. The only other feature appeared in its center: a raised, dime-sized red button, upon which his thumb rested. He pointed the antenna at the podium, where a receiver would trigger a package of high powered explosives, planted by a secret service agent with ten-million Euros waiting in a Swiss bank account.

  After the explosion the stadium would become a gigantic detention center. Everyone would be questioned and searched. Horus knew from where he stood he would need three minutes to reach the exit. The bomb would detonate five minutes after receiving the signal. By that time, his skin pigmentation would be altered and he would be far enough away to avoid suspicion.

  Although the impromptu assassination attempt at Hadassah hospital hadn’t gone as planned, Gillpatrick’s fate remained sealed. The surviving question regarded how the United States might respond. At first, they would search, in vain, for the perpetrator. After the initial outrage, with no clear voice to lead America against the policies favored by the Arabic countries, things would unerringly move in the direction that the oil cartel ordained.

  ~~~

  Fifteen rows from the stage where the ambassador spoke, seated with the proud members of the American delegation, Thomas Franklin applauded as his father finished the stirring introduction of Christopher Gillpatrick.

  Accompanied by his bodyguard, the vice president crossed the stage, hugged his running mate, and motioned for the crowd to be seated. He took a deep breath as he scanned the audience and began what would be the greatest speech of his life. At that very moment, 500 yards away, a red button was depressed.

  Thirty seconds later, while the digital readout attached to the explosives silently counted down, the vice president paused in his speech and asked for his running mate, Benjamin Jefferson Franklin, to return to the podium.

  Franklin, who stood close by at the foot of the stage, seemed surprised, but nimbly climbed the steps and waved to the audience as he rejoined Gillpatrick. After shaking Franklin’s hand the vice president turned and said, “I just couldn’t stand up here without letting the world know that while President Daley and I had some compositional input, most of what we are about to unveil here tonight was the brain child of this man.” He held Franklin’s right hand up, as if he had won a boxing match. Members of the press leaned forward in their front row seats, snapping pictures that would be up-linked instantly to the world’s digital news services.

  Winding his way down the ramps to the stadium exit, Horus could not believe his ears. Ambassador Franklin should have gone back to sit with the American delegates. If he stayed on stage, he would die!

  Helpless to halt what had been set in motion, Horus continued to descend the series of concrete ramps, until he heard Franklin call for his son, Thomas, to join him on stage to share this glorious moment.

  “No!” Horus shouted, halting as he reached one of the ancillary exits. Clasping both hands to the sides of his shaven head, he shouted, “No, not Thomas!”

  Fifteen feet away, a man dressed in black looked up from where he leaned against a concrete wall, his attention drawn by the sudden shouts.

  ~~~

  Thomas Franklin rose from the metal chair in the middle of the American delegation as his father beckoned from the stage, and began to make his way towards the aisle. He stopped every few feet to shake the hands of his father’s longtime friends and supporters who shouted phrases of encouragement as he passed, like, “Chip off the old block,” and “Like father like son.” Some of them stood and clapped him on the back, having known him all of his life, feeling nearly as proud as if he were their own son.

  Franklin beamed as his son approached the stage. He leaned over near a smiling Gillpatrick, and whispered, “Gilly, I want you to know, this is the proudest moment of my entire life.”

  According to the small, red numbers on the digital readout, the time left before the explosion amounted to two minutes and three seconds, two minutes and two seconds, two minutes and one second...

  From her hospital bed, Sonya Franklin watched through tears of joy as her husband and son celebrated this historical moment together with a hug on worldwide television. Longsuffering and humble to a fault, her husband had finally garnered the recognition he had always deserved for years of service to his country and countless nights away from his family. She reminded herself how lucky she was to have such a wonderful man and chided herself for the few times she had been foolish enough to question him based on the unfounded stories that appeared in the tabloids.

  Wincing with discomfort as she sat up to better see the small hospital TV, Sonya joined in with the stadium audience and clapped her hands. She felt a little silly, but was too happy to stop. Their anniversary was three weeks away and, by God, even if she had to dance with the aid of a crutch that night, she would do so. She would hobble around the dance floor and let him know that she was the happiest, proudest woman on the face of the Earth.

  ~~~

  Back in the United States, in Boston, unable to control the way she felt, Jeanne Mosley set her beer on the table and literally bounced up and down on her chair like a teenager. She pointed at the TV and squealed, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it, look at him; there must be like a gazillion people watching!” The group of girls gathered with her at the Cambridge Brewery to watch the broadcast giggled at her childish antics. Some remarked as to what kind of politics they might choose to practice with the younger Franklin, whom they all agreed was way past cute. Looking at him with a whole-new kind of appreciation, Jeanne’s eyes followed Thomas’s every step. After he shook the vice president’s hand he was drawn into a big hug with his father. When the cameras zoomed in for a close-up, he grinned from ear to ear in a way that practically caused Jeanne’s friends to swoon.

  Gillpatrick followed Thomas and his father to the edge of the stage. He stood, clapping, obviously having a wonderful time, while they both stepped down. With the cameras following, they made their way back towards the American delegates who pounded Thomas, and this time, his father, on the back.

  As the applause faded, the vice president walked back to the podium, placed one hand on it and raised the other to indicate his desire to resume his speech. He was interrupted by his bodyguard, who had been given a message by one of the broadcast technicians. “This is the problem with live broadcasts,” Gillpatrick said, “you can’t edit out the little problems that pop up. According to the broadcast engineers, due to some kind of solar flare or sun spots, they are having problems with getting a useable signal from the president’s location, so bear with us for a few minutes, please.”

  Again he left the podium and walked to the far left side of the stage, where he bent to converse with some of the CNN technicians in charge of the evening’s broadcast. When he returned to the podium, he again called out for Ambassador Franklin, who had just reached the aisle where he was to be seated. “Ben, come on back up here for just a minute while they try to fix the president’s transmission signal, would you?”

  Ben laughed as he turned around and proceeded back to the stage. When he got back to the podium he leaned over to the microphone and in a light-hearted voice said, “I hope you didn’t call me back up here to do a duet with you, Mr. Vice President.” The crowd roared and clapped, appreciating the spontaneity.

  ~~~

  The ma
jority of the secret service agents had been strategically positioned inside the stadium, surrounding the areas in front, behind, and to either side of Gillpatrick and the ambassador. Agent Brent Elkin’s had been disappointed when he learned that he would be stationed at an auxiliary exit. But now his eyes grew wide as he realized the person standing less than twenty feet away was the same man who tried to gain entrance to the vice president’s hospital room earlier that day.

  ~~~

  Horus saw that Elkins recognized him and reached for the pistol in his left pocket as he turned and broke into a dead run towards the parking lot.

  Elkins yelled, “Stop! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  Horus had no intentions of stopping. He sprinted away with Elkins in pursuit.

  The echoing voices from the public address system tormented Horus as he fled. He clearly heard Thomas and Ambassador Franklin, and then felt a wave of relief as they evidently left the stage. Using his tremendous conditioning to his full advantage, he continued to run with the speed of an Olympic sprinter, increasing the distance between himself and Elkins to a 30 second advantage as he ducked around the corner of a large, Lincoln S.U.V. and whipped off his jacket.

  When Elkins reached the same point, an excited man who appeared to be of Arabic descent jumped out from behind the vehicle and shouted, “Look out, he has a gun, he has a gun! He went that way!” The man pointed in the direction that Elkins felt the suspicious character must have gone. “You must stop him!” he shouted. “Stop him before he hurts somebody!”

  Elkins required no encouragement. He ran past the man, searching the countless rows of parked cars for a sign of the black man he was chasing. That was when he heard, from close behind, the muffled report of a pistol fitted with a silencer and felt three, burning, Kevlar piercing slugs enter his back, throwing him to the pavement, leaving him choking in a rising pool of blood from his torn lungs. With incredible effort, he rolled over onto his back to get one last look at the face of the man who stood over him.

  Resigned to his fate, Elkins stared into the barrel of an oddly clear, plastic firearm fitted with a long silencer pointed at his forehead. He uttered one last report, which made no sense to the agents and the Secret Service and C.I.A. directors that heard it, even when they reviewed the tape again and again. Sounding amazed, Elkins wheezed, “He’s not black anymore.”

  Chapter Ten

  The majority of the witnesses described the explosion on the stage as being smaller and not as loud as you might have expected. No billowing plume of smoke rose into the air, no fireball and relatively little debris. Everyone remembered a flash of blinding light, accompanied by a bang.

  Many commented that it resembled something from a magician’s act. One minute they saw a podium and two people on stage and the next minute, after a bright flash and a puff of smoke, they were gone. That was how it had appeared from the seats in the stadium and to viewers who had tuned in from all over the world. There were those in the stadium and watching around the world who actually thought it was part of the act. They gasped and then expected the two political figures to turn up somewhere in the audience, smiling and waving.

  While the tedious and unsavory task of locating the scattered, fragmented body parts began, the secret service agents and Israeli police immediately moved to block the exit of anyone attempting to leave Zion stadium.

  Instead of a venue for entertainment and events of world interest, the huge arena became, in effect, a gargantuan holding cell. The interrogation of over 120,000 potential suspects would take days, requiring the skills of over a hundred highly trained interrogators. The American Red Cross was summoned to assist in handling the distribution of food, water and medical care, which would be required on a scale that no one had anticipated.

  At Hadassah Hospital the wife of Benjamin Jefferson Franklin had to be sedated. After the confusion of the first few moments when her husband and the vice president disappeared, leaving the CNN news team and their worldwide audience baffled, the horrifying reality of what had happened sank in. In the blink of an eye she found herself transformed from a happily married woman enjoying the thrill of watching her husband reaching the peak of a long and arduous lifetime of service to his country, to a tortured widow suffering the unimaginable horror of seeing her mate assassinated on a worldwide satellite broadcast.

  ~~~

  Later, at the secret compound in Egypt where Horus grew up, music played while scantily clad women danced in celebration of his triumphant return. The vizier proudly placed a multi-colored robe adorned with the images of vultures about his shoulders, emblematic of his achievement. Horus was encouraged to select any number of the handpicked beauties for his pleasure that evening. Since his return to Egypt, the vizier and lector priests no longer insisted on celibacy, but after the initial lustful adventures in debauchery supplied by his harem, he longed for the intellectual gratification that Jeanne Mosley had provided.

  Although physically alluring, these women were never schooled in matters other than carnal pleasure. He grew tired of their ignorance and their constant bickering and jealousy. He waved them all away, including the vizier and his other teachers, preferring to be left alone in his private chambers. He slumped into a chair and stared at the carvings and painted hieroglyphics on the stone walls that surrounded him.

  The solitude after the day’s events and revelry fostered a period of introspection. Knowing he had caused the death of Thomas’s father, a good man who had treated him fairly, gave rise to a powerful conflict within him. The intensity of the internal struggle could be seen painted across his face. He had never intended for Ambassador Franklin to die. He couldn’t believe how very close his friend, Thomas, had come to dying. Still, someone had to silence the pro-Israeli viewpoints of Gillpatrick. Horus could still see the vice president waving his cigar around at the Franklin home, spouting infectious political opinions with each breath without fully understanding the implications and consequences for the rest of the world. Yes, the views he espoused needed to be smothered.

  ~~~

  That night Horus’s dreams were even more vivid than usual as he saw the body of his father, Osiris, torn into 14 pieces by Set and scattered to the far corners of the Earth. He had endured this nightmare before, but somehow, in this dream, his father’s face became the face of Ambassador Franklin. As the head was severed from the torso, the eyes of the corpse opened, glaring as he began to speak, “No manner of magic shall silence this voice. No curse will quell the eagle’s message, nor prevent his ultimate victory over the falcon. As the winds of the desert and the driven sands erode even the mighty pyramids, so shall your fortunes diminish with each evil task you accomplish. With each atrocity you commit, you shall further expose yourself to your enemies who will fall upon you with a resolve and a force more powerful than the god of Moses and all the high and holy hosts of ancient Israel.”

  While the dream continued, Aset, Horus’s mother, began her search to find her husband’s scattered tissue fragments with the intention of reconstructing him. With the aid of Thoth, the Lord of Magic, she intended to bring him back to life. But tonight’s dream differed from the pattern Horus normally experienced as Aset became Sonya Franklin, assuring her son, Thomas, that revenge would be exacted upon he who had murdered his father. Working with Thoth, Sonya located every piece of her murdered husband and exclaimed, “Lord Thoth, my husband is ready to be made whole again, now restore him to the living with your magic so that he might lead those who would apprehend and punish the man responsible for his death.”

  With the help of Thoth, Sonya created the sacred “Fluid of Life,” and chanted holy incantations while she and the Lord of Magic poured it over the assembled body parts and into the mouth of her dead husband. The separated pieces of flesh and bone literally reached out for each other, and began to join themselves, healing without leaving so much as a scar. When Benjamin Jefferson Franklin opened his eyes, Horus awakened, drenched in sweat, and sat upright in his bed.

  “T
he Fluid of Life shall be mine,” he said, “then, so shall the world.” He shook his fist to emphasize his determination, arose, and walked to the bathroom. After toweling himself dry, he made his way to the laboratory to work on the project that would resurrect all of the powers the original Falcon God possessed 3,000 years ago, powers that would enable him to return Egypt to its former position of world supremacy.

  Tonight’s dream, although different in several ways, held one thing in common with those he experienced on other nights: Each nightmare revealed another important piece of the magical fluid’s puzzle. Hours later, after diluting, purifying and adding the DNA of a jackal to the previous ingredients he said, “This might be the final missing element. We shall test it tomorrow.” He set the test tube back down in its holder on the counter, and with a wry smile, added, “I believe we shall first try it on one of my teachers, perhaps the vizier himself.” He nodded with satisfaction, and added, “I’m certain he will be most honored.”

  ~~~

  In a paneled office decorated with what looked to be an original Monet painting over the large couch and the obligatory framed degrees on the wall behind the massive desk, Thomas listened to the words of Hadassah General Hospital’s chief of psychiatric care.

  “Your mother has undergone a major shock, Thomas, and in all likelihood will require ongoing counseling of some type to help her deal with the loss. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand sudden inexplicable losses are always harder to come to terms with, than situations where—”

  “Doctor Rosenberg?” the receptionist interrupted on the speakerphone.

  “Yes, Rachel?” he sounded annoyed.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but a man is here who says he is from the United States Secret Service. He wants to speak with you. Should I tell him he’ll have to wait?” She spoke so fast that her words ran together, making it difficult to understand her unless you paid close attention.