“And now I want to introduce to you a special guest, a man I’ve come to love like my own father, a man who has made the most generous pledge on record—perhaps in all human history—to save the lost who will be Left Behind. Please welcome the founder of the Global eManager Corporation, that great Christian and philanthropist, Mr. Lambert Sable!”
Sable appeared from nowhere and advanced to the stage, his thin physique oddly encumbered by a large belly only partly concealed in his capacious suit. After the applause, the tone changed, and Pastor Bob found his guest a chair in a cascade of silk plants and bookshelves lightly decorated with cardboard books. Two massive candelabra protruded from the plants with neon candles sputtering and dim under the TV lights.
“Thanks so much for visiting with us, Lam. You’re the head of one of the biggest companies in the world. Just about everyone on the planet uses a GeMphone. It’s a historic success story. But I know you’ll pay quite a price for coming here today.”
Quiet in private, Sable became nervously forceful in front of a crowd. “I’ve been warned, but I trust my coworkers and shareholders won’t hold this against me. At least they won’t for long.”
There was a shout of laughter from the audience.
“Lam, why don’t you tell us a little about how you came to the Lord, and how you came to be here today.”
Sable cleared his throat and sang out in a nasal Texas voice. “Well, Pastor Bob, it was this way. As a young man, I wanted to be a Marine more than anything else. I was tough—I was hard-drinking tough. And I went with the Marines to Lebanon, back in 1983, to try to keep the peace. Well, sir, they hit us hard. One morning we were having breakfast and a Muslim terrorist, an Iranian, we think, hijacked a truck full of TNT and drove it into our barracks. Biggest non-nuclear bomb blast in history up to that point. Over two hundred of my comrades died, and I was unbelievably lucky to survive.
“After that my life went downhill fast. I didn’t know what to live for, with all my buddies gone. I was eaten up with hate and drunken up with drink. Then one day I started to read the Bible. I was fascinated with the Book of Revelation, with the End Time. And everything I’d been through in the Middle East—well, it just seemed like the prophecies were coming true all around me.
“After I left the Corps I went back to the Middle East because I wanted to see the Holy Land. And it changed my whole life. The Bible said the Jews would return. And they’ve returned. The Bible said the whole world would come against them. And it looks that way now, doesn’t it?
“I learned to love the Jews, and it’s a burden on my heart that millions of them will die in the Tribulation. So I decided to try and help them…after I made a few dollars.”
The audience laughed again.
Pastor Bob spoke up, his hair glistening like autumn leaves in the klieg lights. “So Lambert Sable has made a gift to the Left Behind Trust, a gift designated to fund the evangelization of the Jews, a gift that will become valid on his death—or disappearance—at dawn on October 11—Rapture Day!”
A rising roar from the crowd interrupted him, but the pastor let it rise. Then he shouted:
“A gift of three hundred billion dollars!”
Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs, Piazza San Giovanni, Rome 1530h
Ari Davan leaped up the steps adjacent to the Santa Scala toward what Miner always called the locus in quo. His thoughts raced faster than his feet; there was a lot to be learned in the couple of hours before his flight back to Tel-Aviv. The connection between Dr. Shor and Chandos was as unexplainable as it was unmistakable. He couldn’t go back and face Miner without seeing for himself the scene of the assassination.
At the head of the stairs an elegant grillwork gate gave on to the inner chamber, and next to the gate stood a policeman kitted out in full black riot gear with light boots and armor. The helmet was up, and an incredibly young face peered out defiantly at Ari.
“I am from Israeli Security. I have a pass from the state police.” He fumbled with it and the guard said nothing. “Is this the room where the shootings took place?” The guard examined the pass, nodded, and lifted the chain on the gate so Ari could enter.
It was a strange and splendid room, empty, almost cubical—but not severe. The marble floor swirled like windblown clouds of all colors; the walls were of gray plaster indented with empty hollows like sea caves. Large frescos decorated the upper walls, one showing the sturdy, whitish body of an old man with a golden halo crucified upside down, against a backdrop of buildings that looked like geometrical, multi-colored toys—red triangles, green cones, blue and orange towers. Three ancient Romans stood beside the crucified figure, looking on with concern.
The chapel had the air of a neglected museum, but it was clearly a crime scene. Halogen lights hung from a makeshift scaffold, and police tape spider-webbed the center of the room, marking off brown smudges of blood on the marble that trailed away from the gate. At the other end of the room an altar stood in front of a bare, dusty blank space the size of a door on the wall. Ari could tell that something had been removed—something important.
Then he heard a faint “oh” and looked around. A startled-looking woman was rising from a chair in the corner behind him, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand.
“I’m sorry. I guess I must have drifted off,” she said in an exotic English he couldn’t quite place and stood as if to go. She had obviously mistaken him for a building official. Then he recognized her; she was the woman he had seen coming out of the mortuary early that morning. She wore the same open coat and tan dress.
“No, please. I’m from Israeli Security. There’s no need to leave.” Here was someone who might have some information, someone with the energy and time to talk to him. He’d been to see the man Bevo who had charge of security here, but he had not been “available.” The Vatican had not been much help either—the story he had to tell was apparently too complex a trial for the damaged nerves of the police there.
“Ari Davan,” he introduced himself more warmly than was usual for him and showed the woman his identification.
She shook his hand. “I’m Interpol. Mandelyn.” She need not have said anything—he could tell from the large badge on a lanyard who she was and where from. He saw fine brown hair, skin scattered with freckles, and a worn, pensive look in the eyes. Her hands buried themselves in the big pockets of her coat, and she became absorbed in the ceiling as if he had ceased to interest her.
Ari had learned long ago to cooperate with the police—especially other people’s police—to get what he needed. He had no time, so he immediately threw her a morsel.
Looking straight at her he said, “We’ve discovered a connection between Monsignor Chandos and a murder in my country.” She gave him a surprised look and was silent; obviously she wasn’t used to his kind of abruptness. He went on: “Our murder victim was a Dr. Emanuel Shor. We found some evidence at the scene linking Chandos to the crime.”
“What kind of evidence?”
If giving her a little more would help, he would do it. “A piece of DNA evidence.”
“When was this?” She was getting interested.
“Saturday evening—same day as the assassination.”
She laughed as he had expected. The laugh changed her face; an appealing flare came into the eyes. “But Chandos died Saturday morning. In this room.”
He took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I’ve got to get back to my headquarters tonight, and I need to understand what happened in this room.” He waited.
“There are things about Chandos…” she started to say, and then stopped and looked away uncomfortably. Clearly, Interpol wasn’t going to tell him much without a little more warm up—which he really didn’t have time for. But it would have to be done.
He looked around at the chapel, not quite feigning curiosity. “So…what is this place?”
“It’s c
alled the Sancta Sanctorum. It’s very old—thirteen centuries at least. The Pope’s private oratory since about the eighth century. He was here on Saturday to celebrate the Feast of the Guardian Angels.…” She trailed off, her head craning back again to look up at the ceiling.
Oratory, eighth-century, guardian angels. He didn’t want a tour. But if he didn’t take all this in, Miner would be up in arms at him—and Interpol would not warm up. Why was it so hard to get to the point?
“Who are these figures on the wall?” He indicated the fresco of saints that circumscribed the room.
She looked at him as if she had just become aware of him again. “Various saints of the Church. The chapel used to contain some of their relics—the head of John the Baptist, pieces of the True Cross, a box of precious stones from the Holy Land. Urns and elegant reliquaries. All gone now—removed years ago. That’s why this room was called the Sancta Sanctorum—the Holy of Holies.”
Something awoke in Ari’s mind. The Holy of Holies?
“There. On the plaque above the altar…see?”
He looked up at a magnificent marble plinth inlaid with gold lettering:
non est in toto sanctior orbe locus
In a hush, she translated. “In all the world, there is no holier place.”
Ari took these words in. The Holy of Holies. Kodesh Kodeshim. It was all in the Torah somewhere. Va-Yikra, the third book. Leviticus. Only the high priest was permitted in the Holy of Holies, the most fearsome of places, and then only once a year. And what did he do there?
Suddenly sensible of the stillness of the chapel, he almost involuntarily walked away from her toward the altar. What he was looking for, he wasn’t sure, and time was slipping away. But the altar had something to tell him.
And there it was, almost imperceptible. A fine spatter of blood sprinkled the marble, minuscule spots lost among the inclusions in the stone. To Ari the blood on the altar made a kind of weird sense. Instinctively he pressed on the key ring in his pocket and the little button camera he wore came to life. He knelt at the altar, swaying slowly back and forth in order to get the full picture to Miner as soon as possible. He then stood up and made a gradual circle around the room, walking backwards so the camera could pan in all directions. After a moment, he again became aware of Interpol, who was staring at him.
“Do you have access to the forensic reports on this place?” he asked her. She was silent.
“Look,” he said, “there’s blood on the altar. Does it make sense to have blood on the altar? See for yourself.” He stepped heedlessly over the caution tape and stood on the massive brown stain on the floor where the Pope had begun to bleed to death; then he took broad steps toward the gate, following the path of the blood.
Just then the black-hooded guard was in the gateway. He angrily motioned Ari out of the taped perimeter, and Ari complied. The guard glared at him for a moment, and then relaxed but did not move.
“You see?” Ari turned to Interpol. “The Pope was never less than two meters from the altar. First came the chest shots—arterial blood made the big stain. Then the head shot. You can see the splashes here, and here. The altar blood can’t be the Pope’s, and the suicide’s blood shouldn’t be there either.” Ari was quiet for a moment as a look of realization came into Maryse’s eyes. She was intelligent after all.
“There’s no reason for blood to be on the altar,” she said. “It all happened too far away and in the wrong direction.”
“And look at the spray pattern,” he said, taking her by the arm and walking her briskly to the altar. “See?”
The altar stone looked as though a fine brown rain had whipped over it. “The spray—it came from the side,” she exclaimed. “The left side.”
Ari studied the pattern again closely. It might be meaningless—the Pope or the Priest might have looped in this direction, the one trying to escape the other, and flicked blood here and perhaps in many places around the room. In the anarchy of those moments, what did make sense, after all? There was no time to search for other marks. Still, the blood trail to the gate was clear, well-defined.
“So do you have access to those reports?”
“I have them right here,” she said, fumbling for the GeM in her coat pocket. “They’re only preliminary, though.” She selected a handful of files and beamed them into the GeM Ari held out in his hand. Without a word he began flashing through the file names, and then he cursed. “These are in Italian.”
“Let me help,” she said idly, running her finger along the list of files, her head next to his. Suddenly he snapped the GeM off.
“Never mind. I’ll get them analyzed later. I’ve got to go.” His old-fashioned watch was pinging at him. Then he looked up at her face and felt a little ashamed. “Look, I’m sorry to be so abrupt. You’ve been awfully helpful.”
But she was clearly preoccupied; her eyes were not on him but on the altar. “You don’t suppose it’s his blood…the Monsignor’s?”
Ari looked around and quickly calculated the distance between the altar and the marked-off position of the Monsignor well away from the altar on the floor. No anarchical moment could account for those three or four meters. He shook his head: “Not possible.”
“No, I didn’t think so.”
Again he sensed a deep intelligence in the woman from Interpol. Her gaze wandered back up to the ceiling, and he inadvertently looked up with her. He saw dusty medieval pictures of what looked like golden animal shapes, only faintly visible in the darkening afternoon light.
“Well…thank you again,” he said, and turned to go. She uttered a muffled goodbye and smiled quickly, dismissively, at him before she returned her gaze to the ceiling. It felt odd to leave her like that even though he had just met her.
A buzzing little electric taxi waited for him as requested just outside the piazza, and he was off briskly to the airport. He wasted no time downloading his video of the chapel to Miner, then decided to try to make what he could out of the files that Interpol had given him. He was relieved to find that they mostly contained pictures and videos that required no translation; still he was curious about the reports on bloodstain evidence and wondered if he could will himself to understand Italian.
But it was no use. The translation software on the GeM was baffled by these files, and Ari cursed his lack of languages. The taxi driver couldn’t help him; the only English he understood was some variety of the word “airport.” In any case, Miner would make sense of it. So Ari sat back and thumbed through Interpol’s images on his GeMscreen.
He contemplated the crime scene photo of the late pope of Rome, bleakly lit by the bare sunshine, the swollen face half concealed by an outflung arm. The victim had apparently pitched headlong down the stairway; both arms extended as if to break a fall. The body was sheathed in billows of white and gold except for the bare head and two delicate-looking white shoes pointing back almost directly up the stairs.
But Ari was more interested in the pictures of Peter Chandos, who lay in the opposite position, face up, arms thrown open as if embracing someone, all in black except for a long streamer of red silk looped loosely around his head and shoulders. Ari zoomed in on Chandos’s face, the same face he had examined only a few hours before in that refrigerated room. Appropriately, Forensics had taken photos of this man from every angle—his twisted legs, his oddly serene face, his feet and his hands. The ominous black-and-silver gun lying in his slack right hand. It was an old Beretta, probably military issue.
Ari exited that picture file and was intrigued to find another one in the list that was timed only a few hours before.
So he opened it.
“Stop! Stop! Alto!” he shouted at the taxi driver, not noticing that the vehicle was already stopped at a traffic signal. “Go back!” The driver turned to gape at him. “Go back!” he shouted again, making a giant U-turn motion with his hands. “Piazza. Lateran.”
&nb
sp; “Laterano? Ancora?” the man asked.
“Si, si. Yes. Back to the Lateran.” The driver shrugged and circled a roundabout to double back on the route they had just taken.
Ari sat stiffly and willed the driver to hurry, hoping that the Interpol woman would still be there in the chapel. He clicked through image after image of the same thing, more and more rapidly so that the still frames began to zoom past like video—photographed from very close at many angles, rotating in erratic orbit, a scuffed little golden ring.
Chapter 4
Tuesday, October 5, 2027
Air France Flight 2106, over the Mediterranean, 0100h
Ari awoke confused and disoriented. No, he remembered; he was not on the plane to Tel-Aviv. He was on his way to Paris. His head throbbed with cold in the darkened cabin. He groped for a blanket, covered himself, and, warming up a little, gazed out through the pure black circle of a window at the end of his row of seats. He could still hear that calloused voice rasping in his ear: “You’ve got an investigation to run. Get back here now.”
He wasn’t sure himself why he was on this plane at one o’clock in the morning. He knew only that he was chasing five golden letters that still spun through his head. He also knew that the best leads were often the strangest leads. But above all, there was something absorbing about the Interpol agent sleeping in her seat across the aisle from him—her pure curiosity that reflected his. She was warmly inattentive, both helpful and heedless at the same time. And she knew things he needed to know.
Fortunately, she had still been there when he had run back up the stairs into the chapel. He had his GeM in hand before the guard opened the gate; she was standing in the center of the chapel staring hypnotically at the ceiling.
“Tell me about this ring,” he said to her. “All about it.”
She turned and shook herself out of her trance. “I thought you had gone.”
The Day of Atonement Page 17