After a pause, the investment banker spoke up.
“One unrelated question, Mr. Mullburn. But I would like an answer to it. My people would like to know whether you had any hand…directly or indirectly…in the arrest and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Moscow. And please understand the question is not intended to impugn you. On the other hand, my people would appreciate a clear answer to that question.”
Mullburn leaned forward toward the camera and smiled broadly.
“Surely, sir, you don’t believe that I have either the intent or capacity to interfere with operations within the Kremlin? Besides, from what I know of Russian entrepreneurship, it is a complex, if not Byzantine, maze from which no soul that enters ever exits safely—or alive.”
At that, the investment banker smiled, and the other two corporate giants chuckled.
For the rest of the video conference Mullburn smoothly guided the discussion toward a broadening of their coalition. To initiate the formation of a Global Economic Alliance—purportedly for the purpose of counterbalancing the attempt by the United Nations and the European Union to control the conduct of international corporate entities.
Yet each of the three attendees in the small conference room off the coast of California harbored their own suspicions. Concerns about Warren Mullburn’s own private agenda.
At the conclusion of the conference the banker leaned forward, glanced down for an instant, then asked one final question.
“Mr. Mullburn, with all due respect, I don’t believe that you directly answered my question. Did you have any role to play, in any way, in the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky in Russia and the stopping of his proposed oil merger?”
“Let me answer you directly,” Mullburn said with a tinge of sarcasm. “I had nothing whatsoever to do with that event. I have no contacts within the Kremlin. I have no ability to dictate policy to the Russian Federation. Does that satisfy you?”
The investment banker smiled courteously and nodded.
When the satellite transmission was ended, Mullburn strolled over to his desk in his palatial Caribbean palace and pushed the intercom button.
“Ginny?” Mullburn said to his secretary.
“Yes, Mr. Mullburn?”
“Get me Secretary Lazenko. Try his private direct line at the Kremlin.”
“Yes, Mr. Mullburn.”
“Oh, and Ginny…”
“Yes, Mr. Mullburn?”
“Tell him it’s important. I’m not in the mood to wait.”
4
BILL COLLINGWOOD AND HIS WIFE, ESTHER, were waiting patiently in the lobby of the Will Chambers and Associates law office in Monroeville, Virginia. Bill was a middle-aged man, short and wiry, with a tan, creased face. He was wearing a faded blue denim shirt, work pants, and rubber, stable-mucking boots that came up nearly to his knees. He was twirling a baseball cap in his hands, staring at the ground.
Esther, though the same age, looked older. She was pale and slightly drawn. She was wearing a plain dress with a slightly faded flower pattern.
Hilda, Will’s secretary, called them both into the inner office, where Will greeted them both with a warm handshake, seated them, and dove right in.
“Sorry I couldn’t talk to you at the banquet.”
“We understand, Mr. Chambers,” Bill replied in a soft voice. “It’s just that Professor Redgrove recommended you. Very highly. Said you were the best lawyer he ever knew. And told us about some of your cases. Around the country, even in different parts of the world. And also it was very important that we knew you walked with the Lord.”
“I appreciate your confidence.”
“Now, we’re actually here about our son, Gilead. Esther and I have always called him Gil. His full name is Hassan Gilead Amahn. We adopted him. What was he…about ten years old then, dear?”
“Ten and a half,” Esther answered quietly with a smile.
“You see,” Bill continued in his plain, soft voice, “Gil’s from Egypt. His mother was killed there. Right in front of him. It was a terrible thing. She had converted to Christ from Islam.”
“Was that the reason she was killed?”
“Yes, sir. She was a martyr for the Lord Jesus. At first, when Jadeah—that was his mother’s name—when she came to the Lord, well, it was an embarrassment, a great shame to her husband, Abul. His background was, unusually, Shiite Muslim—Shiites are a small minority in Egypt—though he was not particularly ardent or observant. But Gil’s mother, Jadeah, after she got saved, was very open about the Lord. She shared her faith every chance she got. I tried to warn her to be a little more…more circumspect. But she was so excited…she just wanted to witness to every one of her Muslim friends.”
“You sound like you knew the family. Were you over in Egypt?”
“Yes. Esther and I were missionaries with Sudan Gospel Mission. The target area of the mission was Northern Africa and the Middle Eastern countries. We were assigned to Egypt. As you probably know, the Islamic nations are closed to the gospel and to formal missionary work. So we were sent to Egypt with day jobs. I worked with an American manufacturing company in Cairo. That’s where I met Abul—he also worked there. He was a foreman, and because I had an engineering degree, I was his supervisor. So, during the day, I worked at the plant as a production engineer, and Esther worked in the office as a secretary. At night we led small, very secret Bible studies. Jadeah was the first person to come to Christ in that group.”
“How was she killed?” Will asked.
“I went over to visit that Saturday,” Esther said, “and I arrived just after it happened. Abul wasn’t there at the time. It was so brutal. Poor Jadeah. She was walking on her way to the market. She lived in a pretty traditional Shiite neighborhood in Old Cairo. There had been a number of threats against her…the sharia law of the Muslims—depending on which mufti you talk to—sharia law gives Muslims the right to kill those who leave the Islamic religion.”
“Wasn’t she still there in the street when you arrived?” Bill remarked.
“No,” Esther replied. “Someone had dragged her body into her house by then. But she was already dead when I got there. A group had attacked her with rocks while she was on her way to the store. She was hit in the head. She fell to the ground apparently. Then one of them poured gasoline on her and lit her on fire.”
There were a few seconds of silence as Will visualized the barbaric end of that unfortunate woman in Epypt.
“And her son—Gil—he saw the whole thing?”
Bill and Esther nodded solemnly.
Then Bill spoke up.
“Gil is why we’re here. He’s never been in any trouble before. Until now. But he was arrested the other night for starting that big riot with the Muslims—”
“Over at the Islamic Center?”
“Right. That’s the one. Bless his heart, I just think he was there trying to share the gospel with those folks…but…well…you have to know Gil, I guess. He came to Jesus when he was eighteen. Now I call him our young Elijah—”
“Tell him about Abul, dear…” Esther added.
“Oh, yeah. Well, back about six months after Jadeah was killed, Abul had had enough of Cairo. He had an offer from a British company to work at one of their subsidiaries over here in the States—in fact, here in Virginia. Well, as the Lord planned it, Abul gets transferred and comes over here with Gil, and ends up only twenty miles away from where Esther and I were then living. See, shortly after Jadeah’s death, Esther got real sick…malaria…she’s been battling it for several years. So we left the mission field and came back here. Both of us are born and bred Virginians. I ended up working as a project manager for Roland and June Dupree, at their big horse stables. And I do engineering work every year for the Gold Cup—you know, the horse tournament—and doing some handyman projects, troubleshooting jobs, here and there. Well, Abul runs into us here in northern Virginia. We invite him to church with us. He ends up coming to the Lord…and we got pretty close. Good friends. Then he was ki
lled in a car accident. And in his will he stated he wanted us to raise Gil. So we adopted him.”
“Where is he now?” Will asked.
“They’ve got him down at the county jail. I was going to post bail for him. But the federal authorities are talking about holding him under some terrorist law—it’s all Greek to me—but Mr. Chambers, our Gil is no terrorist. No way. If anyone deserves that label, it’s that Muslim sheikh that Gil was preaching to, over at the Islamic Center…but certainly not Gilead.”
“How old is Gilead?”
“Thirty. As of just three-and-a-half months ago,” Esther answered.
“What has he been doing for the last few years?” Will continued.
“He graduated from Bible college. Then, I guess with a little prompting from us,” Bill threw a knowing look at his wife, “he enrolled in the same mission school Esther and I trained in before going out on the field. And we thought that he was being led in the same direction—the mission field. But then…in the last semester, he just dropped out.”
“Do you know why?”
“Not really,” Bill said. “We tried to talk with him about it. He didn’t say a lot. But after he dropped out, he did accept a position as an associate pastor in a small rural church in West Virginia.”
“I was shocked,” Esther said, “when we first visited the church. It was a Sunday that Gilead was scheduled to preach…the head pastor was out of town…it was a small church up in the mountains. In a very poor area. I just wondered to myself, How in the world can they afford to pay two pastors? ”
“Did you ever get an answer to that?”
“Well…more or less.” Esther gave a gentle laugh. “The fact is…I don’t think they were paying him. There was a little apartment in the back of the church—a one-room affair. With a bed and a stove. And outside plumbing…had to pump water from a well. He was staying there rent-free. And folks in the church would take turns bringing him food every week.”
“Maybe it was his growing up in the poor section of Cairo as a boy,” Bill added, “but Gilead has never cared much for material things. He has always seemed content with very little.”
“So…he continued working there at the church in West Virginia?” Will asked.
“Yes,” Bill replied. “For a number of years. Until just before he showed up at that Islamic conference. I called the head pastor, Ralph Wyman, after Gilead had been arrested here in Virginia, and when all the news broke…I thought they should know, if they were looking for him. And Pastor Wyman said that Gilead had already given his notice and left the church, just before heading back here.”
After jotting down a few more notes, Will glanced at his legal pad to see if there was anything else he needed to glean from the parents.
“Well. That gives me a good background. Is there anything else you think I need to know?”
There was a pause. Bill Collingwood threw his wife a quick glance. “Maybe it’s nothing…” he finally volunteered. “But…well…the last few contacts we had with Gilead—”
“Yes?”
“He would say, quite a bit, Dad—the time is short. And so I would ask him what he meant. But he really didn’t explain.”
“That was it? He kept referring to that idea: The time is short?”
Bill and Esther nodded.
“Do you have a guess as to what he meant?”
After a few seconds of silence, Bill answered.
“Just this…whenever he would talk like that—”
“Yes?”
“Well, I could just sense it—like he was carrying this invisible burden. You could just feel that something was troubling his soul.”
Will studied the two parents as they sat there, hands folded in their laps.
He recognized the look on their faces. Will, now that he was a parent too, could understand it.
“When did you start to notice this change in Gilead?”
Esther spoke up after a moment. “I think it was after he came back from his trip last summer—don’t you, Bill?”
Her husband nodded.
“What trip?” Will asked.
“Well…it was a short trip to the Middle East—Jordan, and Israel too, I think,” Bill replied.
Will leaned forward with interest. “What did Gilead do while he was over there?”
After a moment, Bill answered, with a puzzled look.
“You know, we really never could get a straight answer on that…”
5
IN THE SMALL, DINGY APARTMENT in the eastern section of Jerusalem, three men were finishing their tea, sipping from small cups. One of them, an Arab, was serving his two associates from a corroded samovar.
A Frenchman with blond hair in his early thirties, one of the other two, was continuing to press his point in their discussion, in low, hushed tones. Now he was on his feet, quickly walking over to the window to look out, and then stepping back to his spot on the frayed sofa next to the coffee table.
“So the point is,” the blond man said as he seated himself, “we don’t know how closely we’re being watched. I feel sometimes that there are eyes all around us here.”
The third man was a young American, with long, dirty brown hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore glasses, which gave him an odd, scholarly look. His pants were army fatigues, and he wore a frayed plaid shirt.
“So, Yossin,” the American said to the Arab man, “you’re like the intelligence guy here. What’s the deal?”
The Arab man paused. His wife, a delicate younger woman garbed in a dark brown burka, had quietly slipped into the room to check the samovar to see if it needed to be filled with more tea.
The Arab man nodded to her, and she bowed her head and retreated from the room. After she was gone, Yossin, the Arab man, answered.
“There is nothing new—nothing you haven’t heard before. I keep a warm, open dialogue with the Christian groups. The Catholics, Greek Orthodox, the Coptic Christians…we talk. We share tea together. They invite me to some of their interfaith meetings. It’s guarded, but friendly. I doubt any of them have any suspicions. Or concerns. I have no worries there…”
“And what about the Protestants? The evangelicals? I see them as a potential problem,” the Frenchman said. “Because they are without hierarchy. Loosely organized—you never know what’s going to happen there. Don’t you think?”
Yossin was weighing the question, tilting his head slightly one way then the other, before he spoke.
“I do not share your concern. I’ve studied them—the evangelicals—yes, they are loosely organized. And sometimes…it seems…that they blow with the wind. But they have zeal. And their mobility of thought, sentiment—that can be to our advantage.”
“So, you are now talking about—about him?” the Frenchman asked.
“Yeah,” the American added, “you’re thinking now about the appearing of the al-Hakim, right?”
Yossin threw the American a displeased look and raised his hand to silence him.
“My friend,” Yossin said in a low whisper, “we must be cautious—very careful about who we talk about. And what we say.”
“What about other groups?” the Frenchman asked. “Are there any…questions being asked?”
Yossin shook his head.
“I know of none…the Muslims, the Palestinians, they are preoccupied right now with this new peace plan and the statehood initiative. Now they’re all focused on what they see as an imminent victory in obtaining eastern Jerusalem as their capital. And securing the Temple Mount. They pay no attention to us.”
“And the Jews? What about them?” the Frenchman asked. As he did, he was on his feet again, heading over to the window.
“Yeah, like Israeli intelligence—the Mossad,” the American added. “That’s really the bottom line here, right? I’m kinda stressed about whether they’ve got some infiltrators in our group…tapping our phones.”
“I’m not worried about the Mossad,” the Arab man said. “Recently there have been…devel
opments. I’ve made my own inroads. I am working with some people of great influence. And power. And wealth. I assure you, the Mossad will not be a problem.”
The Frenchman was walking back from the window. His voice was tense, animated. He gestured vigorously with both hands.
“The timing is so critical. So monumental—a thousand years of waiting. And now we approach the consummation.”
“And because the Great Appearing is almost upon us, we must be very careful,” the Arab said with a sense of inner calm in his voice. He finished his tea and placed his small cup on the saucer. Then he stared at the American and continued.
“Which is why you must stop the frivolity. We do not want to be noticed—not until the very end.”
“What are you talking about?” the American said, leaning back in his chair and tilting his head.
“I’m talking about the T-shirts. I’ve heard that you’ve worn them—with our name inscribed across the front. You must stop that kind of childishness right now.”
“You’re talking about one of these?” the American said with a big grin. He stood up and unbuttoned his plaid shirt to reveal a picture of a Latin cross on top of a hill with three pillars under the arch of the hill. And at the top of the T-shirt, across the chest, there were large block-printed letters: KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT.
The Last Judgment Page 3