by By Jon Land
A roar reverberated above them. Seconds passed, during which Danielle pictured John Henry Phills reloading his antique cannon. Sure enough, a second roar followed, shaking the tunnel walls with enough force to cough dirt downward.
Danielle picked up the pace, alternating her gaze between the black tunnel ahead and Henley. His voice was weakening, his breathing labored.
“In the second line,” he resumed, “ ‘a day of equal light and dark’ refers to either the autumnal or vernal equinox when there are exactly twelve hours of both day and night, signaling the onset of fall and spring.”
“And an army rising from midland afar?”
“ ‘Midland afar’ is Nostradamus’s term for a particular region of the world: the Middle East, Inspector.”
“And the bringer of fire?”
“Prometheus,” Henley said, “according to Greek mythology. As for a darkness that will reign eternal, symbolically in the prophecies of Nostradamus, darkness refers not necessarily to death but to a demarcation point. An end of things as they are currently known. Forever.”
“In the United States.”
Henley drew even with her in the narrow tunnel. “That’s why my son and daughter are dead, along with a dozen members of my unit.” The flashlight caught Henley’s utterly blank expression. “Because I brought the manuscript to our reunion this year, a grand unveiling, almost like geriatric show-and-tell. My son had just completed the translation. I didn’t realize the stakes involved. I didn’t believe all this any more than you do right now. If only I had, maybe, just maybe . . .”
Danielle could feel his eyes seeking her out in the dirt-stained air. More than a dozen murdered because of an incomplete prophecy? She didn’t want to believe it. Henley’s claims defied reason. Then again, what if the plot was real? If the perpetrators somehow learned that the existence of their plan had been betrayed, they would strike at all those who could expose them.
Coincidence, Danielle told herself. Just coincidence. But even that left a problem.
“There’s something else, Colonel Henley,” she told him. “How did whoever’s behind this plot learn you had uncovered this prophecy?”
“I’ve racked my brain trying to figure that out. As soon as the killings began, as soon as it became obvious it wasn’t coincidence or old age, I contacted everyone I could to find out who they had spoken to about the manuscript or the prophecy. I did my best to trace the connections. There weren’t many and none of them added up to anything.”
“That still leaves the members of your own group. How many were in attendance at the reunion?”
“Just over thirty including wives and a few children. You think . . .”
“What if one of them was involved in this plot somehow?”
“We’re talking about men and women in their seventies, eighties even.”
“You said there were children of 121st members there as well.”
“Pushing wheelchairs, Inspector.”
“How many veterans of your group who attended the reunion are still alive, Colonel?”
“Including Phills and me, only six.”
“I’ll need a list of the other four.”
“All my lists are in this box,” Henley said, still clutching it close to him.
Danielle felt a surge of fresher air, signaling they were nearing the end of the tunnel. “No clue to the substance of the plot, though.”
“True,” Henley agreed. “It must have been specified in the missing line. That’s why we’ve got to find it before it’s too late, and we’re running out of time: the vernal equinox, the first day of spring, is only six days away.”
‘‘How can we find a line that doesn’t exist?”
“I’ve spent the past month reading everything I could find on Nostradamus. There may be more undiscovered prophecies out there somewhere that give some hint as to what the missing line might have said. But where to look? I realized the answer lay in Germany, with figuring out how the team Hitler dispatched located the manuscript in the first place.” He stopped speaking long enough to settle his breathing. “I contacted a man there, an expert on the writings of Nostradamus named Klaus Hauptman, just after my son completed the translation. But the murders began before I could make arrangements to see him. I’d actually planned to leave the morning after that trip I made to the ATM machine. I’ve been hiding out ever since.”
“How’d you find this man?”
The percussion of an explosion rattled the tunnel’s walls and sent dirt showering downward before Henley could answer. A rumble followed and then a sound like a churning engine.
“Run!” Danielle ordered, shining her flashlight ahead of them.
Henley stumbled at first, and she grabbed hold of his arm to help drag him on. Behind them, the tunnel was collapsing, caving in on itself. But Danielle could see the end just a few yards away, the smell of clean air stronger against the backdrop of the rampaging curtain of earth that continued to close on them.
She slammed into the door at the end of the tunnel and twisted the knob in the same motion. In that same instant Henley dropped the lockbox that held the lost prophecies of Nostradamus. She turned back and saw him reaching down for it.
“No!” Danielle screamed.
Henley had just managed to close his hands on the box when the wave of earth overtook him. Danielle threw herself back into the doorway and clamped a hand on Henley’s arm. She dragged and pulled until his head and arms, clutching the case anew, came free. They were covered again just as quickly, and Danielle tried again until her own thighs were swallowed by dirt and rocks.
“Take it,” Henley gasped before the dirt covered his mouth once more.
He managed to extend the steel lockbox but Danielle ignored it and desperately tried to free him. The weight of the collapsed tunnel defied her efforts. She heard Henley retching, gasping for breath.
“Take it,” Henley managed again before the tunnel totally swallowed him and left Danielle scrambling to escape herself.
She plunged through the door, coughing dirt from her lungs, realizing only then she was holding the lockbox containing the lost prophecies of Nostradamus in her arms.
* * * *
Chapter 45
T
he Qalqiliya Zoo had once been one of the most popular attractions in the West Bank. Ben recalled Israelis from nearby Tel Aviv mixing easily with Palestinians in the crowds before the animal enclosures. Peace had still seemed possible then. Now even the thought of a mixed crowd of Palestinians and Jews was not.
Sammy Barr had reached Ben a few hours before with news that he had managed to make contact with the members of the outpost militia he believed must be responsible for Bureij. His plan was to lure them to the zoo that night on the pretext of an issue vital to them, and then use ex-soldier settlers loyal to him to take them into custody until Ben arrived.
“Be careful, Mr. Barr, these men might not be what you expect,” Ben warned, recalling his own conclusions drawn from the videotape of the massacre along with Danielle’s insistence that its origins lay in another place and time altogether.
“You’re in my world now and nobody crosses me here, not a fucking soul.”
“Those kids were in over their head. You might be too.”
“Yeah, sure. You can tell me about it after I turn them over to you, Inspector,” Barr had informed him over the phone.
“Why not just turn them over to the Israeli authorities yourself?”
“Bad for my image. These people, one way or another, are what I’m about. Better you get the credit. . . and the blame. So we’ll escort you to U.N. headquarters outside Ramallah. After that, the militia leaders are yours to do with what you want.”
“Israel will never let us take them out of the country.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“It might be different if you turned them in.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that too.”
“Your cause is going to be hurt by this, Mr.
Barr. There’s no getting around that.”
“Sure, the army will send in more troops, shut down more of the hilltop outposts. Then next month, maybe the month after, they’ll be up and running again. I can live with that,” Barr added, after a pause.
The Qalqiliya Zoo itself, Ben knew, had once been as full of animal life as any in the region, a great boon to the Palestinian economy in general and that of Qalqiliya, a town with a sizeable population of forty-two thousand, in particular. But a combination of insufficient funds and too many bullets had robbed the zoo of its cherished animals. So the zoo’s veterinarian, who had also been trained as a taxidermist, elected to salvage the situation as best he could by stuffing the animals so they could still be viewed. The counterpoint was insane and ironic, typical of the tragedy that had come to dominate the West Bank, the animals having become the latest and saddest victims of a never ending war.
Thanks to an interminable wait at the checkpoint at the one road leading in and out of Qalqiliya, Ben arrived at the zoo nearly an hour late. He had forgotten that the town was cordoned off on three sides, most prominently by a twenty-four-foot wall that Israeli authorities someday intended to extend along the entire West Bank.
Ben parked in a dark corner of the street shadowed by the crumbling stone wall that enclosed the entire zoo. The entrance was just a hundred yards beyond and there was no lock on the gate. Sammy Barr had said he’d be waiting with the leaders of the outpost militia in what had once been the lions’ den, which Ben knew was located in the center of the complex.
He eased the nine-millimeter Beretta pistol Colonel al-Asi had provided from his belt and clung to the shadows just off the main path. There was no longer any electricity in the zoo, meaning the only light came from the half moon sliding in and out of cloud cover. Ben’s eyes adjusted quickly enough to catch glimpses of stuffed antelope grazing forever in a field and baboons that would never leave the trees they had climbed into. A giraffe tending to a baby in a sprawling pen left him especially sad, making him wonder how anyone on either side had let it get this far.
The lions’ den came into view at last, recognizable from the Arabic signs still posted to tree trunks, directing Ben toward it with arrows. There had been Hebrew signs posted once as well, but someone must have torn them all down. The lions’ den was located in a natural depression complete with man-made pond and a smattering of trees and vegetation. It had been the Qalqiliya Zoo’s most crowning achievement once, since an entire pride had been maintained for a few years during which time two cubs were born in captivity.
Ben neared the rim of the depression, still enclosed by a rail fence but with the safety wire that once topped it long ago pilfered to serve some desperate jury-rigged purpose somewhere else. He gazed about, concerned because he could find no indication that Sammy Barr had, in fact, managed to lure the militia leaders here, or perhaps he had not been able to trap them.
Ben leaned up against the rails and peered between them at three stuffed members of the pride lying or standing below. Three of the lions, including the cubs, had actually survived and been transferred to other zoos around the world; not Qalqiliya’s counterpart in Israel’s Ramat Gan, which had refused to take them.
Then Ben saw Sammy Barr sitting amidst the stuffed lions on the dead grass. As far as he could tell Barr was alone, but the farther reaches of the den were hidden by a rock formation and trees, meaning the militia leaders could be over there, inside the attached building perhaps. Ben wedged the Beretta back into his belt, slid between the rails, and moved as quietly as he could down the embankment into the den.
He imagined a male lion was looking at him, as he made his way through the center of the pride toward Sammy Barr.
“Mr. Barr,” he whispered. “Where are they, Mr. Barr?”
Ben thought he saw Sammy Barr start to turn toward him, but there was no response. Crouching, he slid up next to Barr and touched him on the shoulder.
“Did something go wr—”
Ben stopped. His eyes fell on Sammy Barr’s face and the breath seized up in his throat. The face was still and empty with eyes glazed like fat marbles. A thick line of stitches ran up the center of his entire midsection through his torn shirt, leaving a messy trail of dried blood and viscera.
Sammy Barr had been stuffed.
* * * *
Chapter 46
B
en’s stomach quaked. A wave of nausea swept over him, and he doubled over feeling he might vomit.
The move saved his life; gunshots fired from the fence-line above singed the air just over his head. Ben rolled away and felt Sammy Barr’s corpse fall over and smack into his legs as bullets punched into it. He reached the edge of the hill and rolled down the slope toward the man-made pond, mud-colored and only half-full now.
Halfway down, he spotted the first of the bodies. Casually dressed men with sidearms still in their holsters, six in all. Four lay on the embankment. Two more had ended up inside the pond. Clearly the men Sammy Barr had come here to meet had turned the tables on his forces. By the look of things, it was an ambush and had been over very quickly.
Ben heard the scramble of footsteps in the den above and stripped the Beretta from his belt. In his haste to get inside the zoo, he’d forgotten to pocket the spare clips al-Asi had provided, leaving him with sixteen shots and no more.
The footsteps above grew louder, joined by a brief exchange of hushed whispers. Ben tried to count the voices, the number of steps, get some idea of how many he was facing. He pulled himself between a pair of bodies for camouflage and used the raised shoulder of the nearer corpse as a prop for his pistol.
Ben had just steadied it on the rim above when another burst of automatic fire coughed mud from the embankment in the air. Then a second weapon joined in and Ben dug himself lower into the soft earth. Still clutching the Beretta, he angled himself downward and slipped into the pond. More bullets chased him and rivulets of water sprayed upward.
He dropped under the fetid pond surface and stroked to the other side. He emerged just a few yards from the entrance to a concrete walkway that led into the lions’ enclosure. Ben pulled himself through the muck, speeding up only when another burst of gunfire bore down upon him.
Soaked now, he dashed along the brief length of the walkway and found himself inside the lions’ cage. Since this part of the zoo had been long closed, the gate had been left open. Absurdly, Ben thought as he surged through it and entered the exhibit hall, the cage still smelled strongly of the animals that would never be using it again.
More stuffed and preserved animals stood on display inside the hall as well. A number of monkey species, Ben noted, and a sprawling display of animals that called the desert home; their natural habitat re-created, sand and all. He considered a sprint to either of the building’s two exits, then gazed through the darkness again at the hall’s desert habitat and opted for something else.
Ben hurdled the solid waist-high fence and felt his feet sink into sand. He cringed and nearly cried out when a few of the desert animals he thought were stuffed squealed and scattered in terror. Obviously the Qalqiliya Zoo still boasted at least a few surviving species.
The animals continued to scamper away from him as Ben burrowed into the sand, burying himself as best he could. There was only enough sand to cover him if he lay flat on his stomach. In the darkness, even under the spill of a flashlight beam, the ruse might work so long as he didn’t act too fast. He held the Beretta ready, barrel protruding just above the surface, and positioned himself for a clear view of the gallery.
Footsteps pounded from the lions’ cage, smacking the display room floor hard. Ben heard two distinct sets and steadied his pistol. His heart thundered against his chest. He tried to force himself to breathe evenly.
Ben squeezed one eye closed and held the Beretta steady. He could see the two men coming now, sweeping left and right with their assault rifles, wearing what looked like night-vision goggles. He willed himself to wait until they crossed the re
ach of the Beretta’s barrel.
A million thoughts sped through his mind, so many situations like this the past few years. What was it Danielle had told him? You never get used to it, but you learn to accept it. And at that point half the battle is won.
The men crossed directly in front of the pistol’s front sight. Ben opened fire, rotating the barrel only slightly and firing off ten shots in rapid succession. He stopped only when he saw the two men go down, then lurched out of the desert animal exhibit, causing his reluctant neighbors to scurry once more.
The bodies were lying facedown on the floor, and Ben left them there. He swiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve and advanced down the middle of the hall, pistol held in both hands, ready to fire at the first sign of motion. The far door that spilled out close to the street was open and he picked up his pace toward it. The fresher smells of the night greeted him as he crossed over the threshold.