“Stop right there…” Himlet said. And then he pointed to the name of an organization under the “K’s.”
The screen read, “Knights of the Temple Mount.”
“I want you to access that,” Himlet said, reaching a long index finger to the computer screen and touching the words.
Putrie clicked his cursor onto the organization’s name, and then onto the monthly reports, ending with the latest one. At the side of the screen there was a box, and next to it the text “Digest of Daily Reports.”
“Click on that,” Himlet commanded.
Putrie complied, and a terse memorandum appeared on the screen:
AGENT: JKA
TERR. ORG.—KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT
SUSPECTED LEADER YOSSIN ALI KHALID
IDEOL.—SUBSECT OF DRUZE RELIGION. APOCAL., SYNCR., ISLAM + CHRIST. MYST. + JUD. CULTIC
OPERATIONS—DATA NOT COMPLETE
“Good. Very good, Mr. Putrie.” Himlet rose from his chair and leaned down over the computer desk, his face only inches from the computer screen. He pointed to the last entry, where it indicated “DATA NOT COMPLETE.”
“I will, of course, be reporting this to Mr. Mullburn. I’m sure he will be quite pleased.”
Putrie’s face beamed.
“Now, for the next phase,” Himlet said, placing his hand on Putrie’s shoulder. “That is going to be perhaps even more challenging.”
“What are we talking here?” Putrie squinted through the thick lenses of his glasses.
“I need you to rearrange this data a bit. Take out a line of text. And then imbed another line of text. Without leaving a trace. Without leaving a clue behind.”
Putrie paused for a moment, considering Himlet’s directive. He smiled, removed his thick-lensed glasses, and wiped them on his shirt.
“I assume this project is very important…this is critical information…Mr. Mullburn told me how important I was in our meeting together.”
“And your point is?”
“A little financial incentive…some bonus action.” Putrie started rambling. “If I’m able to complete this project exactly the way that you described it. I would expect that there would be some really big-time, juicy remuneration for me.”
But Himlet was already halfway across the room, heading for the door.
He spun on his heels and made one last comment.
“That next project needs to be completed in seventy-two hours. And then after that…we’ll talk about one additional, much different computer application…also a rush. Good day, Mr. Putrie.”
Himlet activated the entry, slipped through it, and then the massive electronically operated door slid shut behind him.
Putrie was rocking gently in his chair in front of the computer console. He was half-talking and half-singing to himself now. And smiling as he did.
25
IT WAS VERY LATE. Andrew, Will, and Fiona were asleep.
Fiona was dreaming—but what it was about, she could not later remember.
Then she was aware that the telephone on the nightstand next to her head was ringing. Getting her bearings and separating dream from reality, she reached for the phone, knocking the receiver off the base.
She then turned on the nightstand light, grabbed the receiver, and put it to her ear.
“Mrs. Chambers? Fiona Chambers?”
“Yes,” Fiona answered slowly, still emerging from sleep.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Chambers—”
“What?”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Chambers, to tell you. But your father, Angus MacCameron, has just passed away…around three AM. I’m so very sorry…but he did go very peacefully.”
Fiona sat on the edge of the bed in stunned silence.
“What…what did you say…how did he die?”
“He died in his sleep, Mrs. Chambers. Very peacefully.”
Fiona began sobbing gently, and she said in a very quiet voice, “Oh, Da…Da…you’re with the Lord now…”
By now Will was awake, sitting upright in the bed next to her. He jumped out of bed, circled around, and gathered his wife in his arms while he gently took the telephone from her.
With the night-shift nurse, he discussed the strangely mundane and bureaucratic details of the body, the funeral home, and the other arrangements.
After he hung up the phone he gathered Fiona in his arms and held her for a long time while she cried, and tried to talk, and cried some more.
Will knew that he had to be strong for Fiona. But it was hard. He choked back his own tears as he held her, thinking how Angus had been a kind of second father to him.
After a while, Will walked downstairs to the great room with Fiona. He fixed some tea, and they talked and drank tea, and hugged and cried until the first gray light of dawn broke through the windows. And they stayed there until the piercing light of the sunrise appeared over the mountain range they could see from the front windows.
They heard some movement upstairs and went up to Andrew’s bedroom. He was awake. Somehow he had sensed that some important—some very difficult event had just happened. They lovingly told him that Grandpa Angus had just died in his sleep.
Now, they said, he and his wife, Helen, who had died some years before, were rejoined in the splendor and the glorious hope that Angus had always preached and had so intensely trusted in.
Five days later, the funeral was held. Angus was buried next to Helen. A bagpiper played and a gospel singer, a friend of Fiona, sang a contemporary version of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
There was a large turnout. Not only members of Angus’s current church, but also a few members of the church that he had pastored in Pennsylvania many years before. And of course, there were scores who came because they had been ardent subscribers to Angus’s Bible archaeology magazine, Digging for Truth. They were also joined by the staff of Will’s law firm, as well as many of Fiona’s friends and music collaborators.
Dr. Len Redgrove did not attend the funeral. Instead, he sent a simple sympathy card.
The most surprising attendee at the funeral was Jack Hornby, the Washington, DC–based reporter who had covered the original legal case that had first brought Angus MacCameron, his daughter, Fiona, and Will Chambers together.
Hornby respectfully expressed his condolences to Fiona, then shook hands with Will. And just before turning to leave, he said something quietly, as an aside, to Will.
“This is not the time, but I’ve been meaning to get ahold of you. I need to talk to you about something. I’ll give you a call at your office in a couple of days. Is that all right?”
Will nodded.
Will’s aunt, Georgia Chambers, was there also, having driven up from North Carolina. Her husband, Bull, was too ill to join her.
After the funeral, friends and family members gathered at Will and Fiona’s great log house. Georgia Chambers took Andrew aside and hugged and kissed him, and took the opportunity to reminisce about his birth. How he had been born at the end of a summer vacation when Will and Fiona had come down to Cape Hatteras and stayed in the small ocean cabin next to Georgia’s. She went over, again, the strange and exciting story of the circumstances of his birth. How, just days after his birth in a hospital on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, his father, Will Chambers, became engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a man who, to Georgia’s way of thinking, “was just about the total personification of evil.”
Of course, Andrew loved to hear the story of how Will had handled and won a bizarre legal case down near Cape Hatteras, only to become embroiled in a modern-day encounter with piracy, buried treasure, and drug-smuggling villains.
Andrew and Georgia sat on the swing on the front porch of the house, looking at the mountains. The boy sat mesmerized, hearing again the real-life adventure story where his father was the hero.
Until the last visitor left, Fiona kept herself busy serving food and greeting everyone. But when the house was empty except for her and Will, and Andrew had gone to bed,
Will could see the fatigue on her face. He came up behind her at the kitchen sink and wrapped his arms around her.
“Don’t do the dishes, honey. I’m going to do them. I want you to stretch out on the couch. Want me to make a fire for you?”
Fiona simply shook her head and kept working on the dishes. She had a vacant and tearful look on her face.
So Will chipped in, working next to her as they rinsed the dishes and stacked the dishwasher full.
Fiona said she didn’t want to go to bed—that she couldn’t—and it was well after midnight when, at her request, Will finally did make a fire in the fireplace, even though the night air was quite balmy.
They didn’t say much. They sat next to each other on the couch in the great room, Will holding his wife tight. They fell asleep that way. But before they did, Fiona wiped the tears from her face and said something to Will.
“Stay with me. Please don’t leave me…”
Will pulled her closer. And he reassured her that nothing in the world could separate them.
26
IN THE LITTLE CAFÉ ON TOPIS ISLAND, the second largest island in the Republic of Maretas, Orville Putrie was looking at the real estate closing statement. He was shaking his head and muttering obscenities to himself.
Across the table, his real estate agent—middle-aged, decked out in white linen pants, a flamingo pink shirt, and an ocean-blue tie—was sucking on a cigarette and smiling from behind his Ray-Ban sunglasses.
“Look, let’s hurry this up,” the agent said. He waved a waiter off. “I don’t have time to eat here. I’ve got to catch a plane out of this tropical dump. Eat later I guess—come on, Putrie…”
“This can’t be right…” the other man muttered. Suddenly he noticed something.
“What is this…this $10,000 charge for ‘additional risk services’?” Putrie whined.
“Just what it says. I risked a lot taking care of your beach house back in North Carolina—you know, buying it out of foreclosure for you after you took off with the cops after you…and then getting a very pretty profit for you out of it. It’s all part of the cost of doing business—”
“You’re supposed to be my real estate agent, not a rip-off artist.”
“Buddy boy, there are still arrest warrants out for you back in North Carolina. Get real. I’m running a big risk even flying down here to pay you off. Just be glad I was able to salvage something for you—especially after you vanished into thin air with the cops trying to hook you into the drug running stuff.”
“You can’t do this to me.” Putrie’s face was screwed up into a knotted expression of internal rage.
“I can’t do it? I can’t? Who are you to talk to me like that, you twisted little bug? So what are you going to do about it? How about this—how about, when I get to Miami, I make an anonymous call to the feds…or maybe to the district attorney down in Cape Hatteras when I get back home…and tell them I know where you are. How about that?”
Putrie was silent in his mental agony.
Then the agent got up and tossed an envelope onto the table.
“Don’t be an idiot, Putrie.” He threw his cigarette onto the ground, crushed it, and walked away.
Orville Putrie took the envelope, looked into it, and counted the money.
“$10,000 short,” he muttered.
He trudged over to his house on Topis Island. After a few minutes of stewing on his couch, he looked at his watch. Then he strolled into his little greenhouse in the back. He looked at some of the plants and trimmed off a few of the leaves. Then he strolled among his plant collection, misting it with his water sprayer. Now his mind was calmer.
A few hours later, the real estate agent checked out of his motel room. A taxi was waiting for him. And Putrie was in his car, a hundred feet away, watching.
The man he was following was dropped off at a little restaurant next to the airport. He strolled in and was shown to a table. Putrie parked, then walked to the back of the restaurant. Outside, next to the dumpster, one of the cooks, in a dirty apron and a T-shirt, was taking a cigarette break.
Putrie greeted him and made small talk.
At his table, the agent ordered the seafood salad with lime-juice-mango dressing and a martini.
Three hours later, his plane was cruising high over the Atlantic, en route to Miami. Suddenly, the flight attendants alerted the pilots about a medical emergency.
The crew radioed ahead. One of the passengers had gone into respiratory distress—followed by convulsions and frothing at the mouth.
Twenty minutes later, the real estate agent was dead.
27
THERE WAS A NEARLY ELECTRIC MOOD of anticipation in the Old City section of Jerusalem. For the last three days Gilead Amahn had been preaching, almost nonstop, on street corners, in front of sidewalk cafés, and along the rows of shops frequented by both tourists and locals.
And on each occasion, the Knights of the Temple Mount made sure that a dozen of their secret contingent were there, creating an enthusiastic semicircle around Gilead whenever he spoke.
The group would create a useful magnet for drawing a larger group of onlookers. But in addition, the Knights, who never identified themselves by dress or even gesture, understood they were there for another purpose—to provide security in the event of any attack on their prophet.
That morning Yossin had met with the other two members of leadership of the Knights—the Frenchman and the American. He told them that he had been fasting and praying. That he believed this was, indeed, the day.
This would be, he told them, the beginning of both the grand horror and the divine unveiling.
And so they led Gilead through the Old City to a designated spot.
The American was given the task by Yossin, of guiding Gilead down the Via Dolorosa with a large group of disciples of the Knights of the Temple Mount close behind. Along the winding, narrow streets, through the tunnel-like labyrinth lined with stone façade, and under the shadows of the canvas awnings stretched over door openings, Gilead was smiling and greeting people they passed.
The group, with Gilead and the American at the lead, passed beneath the Ecce Homo Arch, the remnant of the first-century structure within which Pontius Pilate, Roman governor, had displayed a broken and bruised Jesus of Nazareth, and then said, Ecce homo—Behold the man.
The contingent paused as Gilead looked up at the two-thousand-year-old stones of the arch.
Tourists, local merchants, and shoppers filled the Via Dolorosa. Now they were having to squeeze past the large group encircling the young preacher.
As if on cue, the American whispered something to another in his group, a few gestures were quietly made, and then, with seeming spontaneity, the group began singing its own medieval-sounding hymn:
THE KINGDOM IS COMING,
THE KINGDOM IS COMING.
CLEAR THE STONES,
PREPARE THE WAY.
WE ARE HIS CHILDREN,
THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT.
The procession of disciples now gathering a larger entourage, was slowly making its way closer to the Temple Mount.
One of the onlookers, a member of the Knights, yelled out:
“Tell us, Gilead…about the end of the age. The coming of the Promised One.”
The Knights had been careful to plan each sermon so it would begin with a seemingly random question and answer.
And so Gilead began to preach.
He said there would be both wars and rumors of wars.
Nations would rise up against other nations, and kingdoms against kingdoms.
He spoke of famines and earthquakes.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said to the crowd in a powerful voice, his words echoing off the ancient stone walls around him. “All of these things are simply the beginning of birth pangs—”
“What will happen to us? What can we expect? Will we be persecuted?” one of the secret followers of the Knights yelled out.
“Yes, of course,” Gilead responded. “T
hey will come and deliver you up to tribulation. And some of you they will kill. And you will be hated by all nations. And you must be on your watch because many will fall away and will turn one another into the authorities. And hate one another. Because lawlessness is going to increase. The love of human beings toward one another will grow dim…slowly…turned down like the heat on a stove—until finally, the love in the hearts of many will grow cold and dead.”
As Gilead addressed the crowd below, up on top of the Temple Mount platform—that one-million-square-foot plateau of peaceful columns and trees and walkways and mosques—hundreds of Muslim faithful were gathering in the al-Aqsa Mosque for worship. They entered, removed their shoes, and then knelt in unison, bowing and worshiping.
Down at street level, Gilead’s preaching had caught the attention of several Israeli police. A male and female police officer, glancing at each other and gesturing, both hurried over to the gathering crowd to disperse them. There were now nearly a hundred onlookers. Several had now appeared in opposition and had worked their way to the front and were arguing with Gilead.
But the preacher seemed unperturbed. He responded to the volley of questions with poise and confidence.
In the very back of the outer ring of humanity, Yossin and the Frenchman stood shoulder to shoulder, listening and watching intently.
One of the Knights shouted out a question, louder than the others.
“What about the Temple Mount? What are the signs? How can the Temple be built when the Muslims control the area? Doesn’t Holy Scripture say that the Temple must be rebuilt?”
“Listen to the words of Scripture,” Gilead shouted. “ ‘Therefore when you see the “abomination of desolation,” spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place’—”
He now stepped away from the crowd and pointed directly at the Temple Mount and the shining golden dome atop the plateau.
“That is where the holy place should be,” he said in a voice that boomed and echoed.
The Israeli police were working their way through the crowd, trying to disperse them and get to Gilead, who was in the very center.
The Last Judgment Page 12