The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  Sarah Alman. He saw her looking down at him from an olive tree branch where she had climbed. Thin, dark, wiry, she was a technician in the Shin Bet lab. For a year they had been caught in a quiet little web of looks and smiles before he had found the courage to speak to her. Then he had taken her on a picnic to the Mount of Olives; after that it was only two weeks before he was talking to her father, Reb Alman, an Orthodox scholar who gazed exhaustedly at him in full recognition that this was the best he was likely to get for a son-in-law. It was the only time Miner could remember wearing a kippah. When the Tay-Sachs test turned up positive, though, Sarah could not be prevailed on. It would be too much for her father and mother—they needed grandchildren. She left him, she left the lab and went to Technion. This was what Judaism had brought him. Miner turned the ragged photo over; it was better not to think about it.

  The ring, by contrast—that was something to think about. The Internet, so profligate with information on nearly everything, was maddeningly silent about the inscription on this ring. He had e-mailed the image of the ring to the network of jewelers the police used in their investigations—no one had recognized it so far. Those that responded all agreed that the ring was an old piece of work; how old they could not tell without examining it. The fact that the Italian police had another like it was stunning. But they too had discovered nothing. Now it was time to take extraordinary measures.

  Only Kristall had the key to the Black Hole, so he decided to go see her himself. Climbing those stairs was something he dreaded. He knew that she valued his digging ability, and that was the only reason she would let him use the key, but they were not friends. She had not been pleased by the Sarah Alman business, but in his mind that was only the sort of rationale she was eager to find for disliking the men she was forced to work with. She repelled him.

  From inside a blur of smoke, Kristall frowned at first at the intrusion but then held her GeM up above her head.

  “I have something for you and Davan, if you can get his attention,” she snapped, without really looking at him. Almost automatically he pulled his GeM off his belt and held it to hers for a quick download. “You’ll want to look that over. There’s something going on here with our Palestinian friends. I want to know everything you can find on this character. Now.”

  “I need to use the key.”

  “What for?”

  “Nothing’s available on the ordinary channels about the inscription on Shor’s ring. We know it connects to Ari’s investigation in Rome, which makes it high priority to find out what it means.”

  “I know that. Go ahead. But keep it to the inscription.”

  That was a dismissal, and Miner took it quickly. He didn’t wait for her to send the code downstairs but left and descended in the lift to the cell below the building where the Black Hole was located. His palm print was enough to get him into the room, but the inner black-and-red booth required an electronic impulse from the director’s office far above. Here a waiting communications officer let him into the booth without a word. Inside it was cool; under red light a square black box protruded from the wall. He sat down at a keyboard, logged in, and entered simply the letters “DVCEI.”

  The stars still shone over a granite mountainside in Colorado, where the only sounds were the chirp of a late-season cricket and the errant whisper of the wind. In a strong room sixty meters below the surface, another black cube, much larger than the one in Jerusalem, began to hum almost imperceptibly. The whine of the machine deepened as it pursued this unique combination of letters through the virtually boundless maze of intelligence it contained. Soon other black boxes were enlisted in a network that stretched from the Rockies to the Alps to the mountains of Xinjiang. At last the humming stopped.

  Other than “did-you-mean-this?” the search produced nothing. Nothing at all.

  Miner was more than disappointed. He was shocked. He had gone into the Black Hole four or five times before, and winnowing through it had taken weeks—in one case, months. Staring at the nearly empty screen, Miner realized that he had never faced nothingness before. The Black Hole had always given him too much to work with, far too much. This case, with its tantalizing connections, kept dissolving before his eyes into nothing.

  It was intolerable. For a moment his hands lingered hungrily over the keyboard. He wanted to enter Emmanuel Shor. Nathan Levinsky. Technion. The Nanoelectronics Institute. In this room he was a wolf after meat. But Kristall would know immediately, so he logged off and pushed himself away from the box.

  “Well?” A voice crackled on his GeM.

  “There’s nothing on the inscription. I can’t understand it.”

  “Never mind. What about the download I just gave you?”

  “You want me to search that?”

  “I do now. But only that.”

  Whatever she had given him, it must be important; he pulled up the message and was puzzled. It was the manifest for an October 2 airline flight from Rome to Tel-Aviv with one name circled. “What am I looking at?”

  “A name that intersects with the following parameters. Are you secure?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  “Who fits these parameters? Within 48 hours of October 2: Contact with Chandos confirmed. Presence in Rome confirmed. Presence in Haifa confirmed.”

  Miner whistled. He asked the Black Hole to transliterate the name that appeared and watched it convert automatically from the Arabic into the Roman alphabet:

  Nasir bin-Hafiz al-Ayoub.

  The Nanoelectronics Institute, Technion, 1130h

  Shimon Tempelman finished his “elevenses” of crackers and potted meat just in time for his meeting with David Kane. He knew the man would be precisely on time, and so he was; the reception signaled him of Kane’s arrival on the dot of 1130 hours. Shaking crumbs from his white tropical shirt, he went out to the golf cart that carried him around the Institute and pressed its droning little motor into action.

  Because of the unbelievable heat he had decided not to put his summer clothes away and was still far from putting on the trousers and blazer that were his autumn uniform. David Kane was a fastidious professional; it pleased Tempelman to visualize Kane’s face when he walked in wearing shorts and an open-necked shirt.

  He arrived just as Kane’s black car with its heavily-tinted windows swept into the drive before the Nanoelectronics building. The car seemed to explode as dark-suited men leaped from it, including the head of Interpol with his tightly cut white hair and a gleaming microGeM curved around one ear. Tempelman was a bit disappointed when Kane barely looked him over and motioned him into the building. Surrounded by Technion security, Tempelman led Kane and his three guards into a conference room.

  “Is this room secure?” Kane asked abruptly.

  Tempelman smiled as he surveyed the four Interpol men, knowing full well that they were capable of transmitting video and audio of everything in the room to any point on the planet, and without detection. “Of course,” he laughed.

  At last, Tempelman noticed, Kane was looking distastefully at his knees, and he chuckled again. During his stint as Israeli ambassador to Interpol, he had known Kane slightly but without much pleasure; the man was too intense for his taste. Tempelman’s primary interest in the job had been the scattering of world-class restaurants around Lyon; the less involved he was with the politics of Interpol, the more he liked it. He had his job to do, and he had done it competently.

  “Do you have anything new on this case?” Kane asked him.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Nothing on the eyelash?”

  “Why don’t you ask Shin Bet? I’ve not heard a thing for forty-eight hours. Besides, I’m not in the investigative business.”

  “Then what business are you in?”

  Tempelman smiled without contempt. “I keep the doors locked.”

  “Apparently not all of them. What happened to the 24-hour
surveillance cameras on Saturday?”

  “Someone disabled them. Only in this building.”

  “And there was no alarm?”

  “Look, Kane. I work every day with people who win Nobel Prizes for their cleverness. If they want to get around an alarm system, I’m not equipped to stop them. I’m not paid enough to keep up with their ingenuity.”

  “So. As of now, you have no traces, no leads, no evidence of any kind.”

  “None whatsoever.” Tempelman shrugged. “But I don’t believe the case presents many difficulties. Obviously, someone wanted the object, knew Shor had access, and either duped or forced him into getting him—or her—into the laboratory. Shor was now a useless liability, so pop pop pop.”

  “But no traces at all. Nothing. Not the slightest bio-trace.” Kane looked severely at him, and he shook his head.

  “Other than the eyelash.”

  “Yes, there is the eyelash. We’ve identified it.”

  Tempelman looked only mildly interested. “Then you’ll be making an arrest?”

  Kane walked around a conference table and sat down. Despite his bulk, he moved fast. “Tempelman…you’ve been hit with a major breach. The most closely guarded, most highly classified project in this country has been blown wide open. And you were responsible for security. Yet you seem unperturbed by any of it.”

  “And that seems odd to you.”

  Kane lifted a microspeaker the size of a playing card from his shirt pocket and held it up. Another voice—a deep and distant voice—broke in.

  “It seems odd to me, too.”

  Tempelman swallowed at the sound of this voice. It belonged to the Prime Minister.

  “Yesterday you played two rounds of golf,” the voice addressed him as if from a hollow place in the wall. “And this morning, after breakfast, you canceled your weekly staff meeting to play another round.”

  Tempelman reflected for a moment and then sprawled into a chair, abruptly realizing that none of this mattered much. He had ceased some time ago to worry about these things. Nothing was more valuable than his golf time.

  “That’s why I moved here from England. For the climate.”

  The Prime Minister sniffed hard and Kane looked visibly upset.

  “What can happen?” Tempelman piped up. “The patents are secure—Catriel Levine has seen to that. Nothing is as fleeting as a secret technology anyway. Whoever took the object put himself to a great deal of trouble to put us at some imaginary disadvantage. What Levinsky has done others will do…and quickly.”

  “You seem sure of that,” the Prime Minister said.

  “In this job I have time for more than golf. I also read quite a lot. And on the links you end up talking to yourself a good deal.”

  Kane looked up at him. “Any theories as to why anyone would do this, then?”

  “Could be anybody, of course, but no one with any real knowledge of the field would take this kind of snatch-and-grab game seriously. Too hard to monetize. My guess is they want it for a weapon.”

  There were two heavy sighs—one electronic. The pain came back to Kane’s face.

  “That’s our theory as well,” the Prime Minister confessed. “It would take a deal of ingenuity to make a weapon of it, according to our best information. Other uses are far more profitable. But in a limited way, it could be devastating.”

  “A comparative squib,” Tempelman observed. “Perhaps a single moderate-sized building, but no more. A conventional explosive would do as well.”

  Kane was now talking to the air. “But who? Who’s equipped to do this kind of traceless work?”

  Tempelman shrugged again. “Can’t get a weapon into the campus except through the front gate. We’ve got the same system they have on the Temple Mount…had it before they did. And no bio-traces. Nil. Except for an eyelash.”

  “So?”

  “That means it was probably planted.”

  Kane tilted his head and looked disbelievingly at Tempelman, who stared back at him in mild surprise. He had not known Kane well, had not really wanted to, but would never have taken him for a dull cop.

  “Look. Someone’s playing a very funny game here. I don’t know who Eyelash is, but from your inaction on the subject, I take it you’ve been pointed in an impossible direction. At this stage, what puzzles me is that so little is at stake.”

  “So little?” the Prime Minister sniffed again.

  Tempelman saw no reason to repeat himself, and he was tiring of this circular conversation. “Well, Kane, you wanted to see the scene. Let’s go have a look.”

  He stood and led the group through four security portals to the lift, then up to the corridor. Police caution tape ringed the spot where Shor had lain. Hands in his pockets from the sudden cold, Kane walked around mutely while his agents stood silent at the lift door. Tempelman leaned against the wall, considering the big man, and figured it would not be long before he too would stop worrying.

  A few minutes later, Kane rubbed from his shoes the white dust that covered everything in this country and climbed back into the car. In the dim silence he heard the Prime Minister’s voice again.

  “I suppose he’ll be heading back to the golf course. When we put him in charge there, I had hoped he would be clever enough to keep the doors locked.”

  Kane thought for a moment, then replied.

  “He is.”

  The Cathedral of Chartres, 1030h

  Ari wondered why the towers of the cathedral were so different from each other. One looked primitive, like a plain rock cone; the other dripped with decorative stone work. Maryse told him that the plain tower, the original, was to have been taken down and replaced with a twin of the elaborate one, but the project was never completed. Ari was glad; he preferred the honest older tower.

  Inside, the cathedral was so dim he could barely see. Once they cleared the barrier at the gate, the nave opened to view in almost limitless darkness. What light there was oscillated strangely; then he realized that clouds were rushing past the windows in the freezing wind outside. Far overhead he caught fluctuating glimpses of colored crystal—these were the famous windows of Chartres.

  He was much more startled by the scene in front of him. It was so dark that at first he thought he imagined it. A sea of empty caneback chairs filled the nave, and among the chairs, a handful of people tottered and wobbled, some on their knees in the aisle, some climbing over two or three chairs at once, some carrying candles and quietly praying where they stood. One bearded man wearing a headband, eyes closed, balanced on one leg between two chairs. Two girls formed a circle with a boy in dirty evening clothes in the middle of the aisle, all three of them staring dreamily up at the ceiling.

  “What are they, acrobats?” he whispered to Maryse.

  “They’re doing the labyrinth.”

  She pulled him toward a small shop just inside the entry where a few books and postcards were on display. Among the cards showing glittering stained glass was a blank white card featuring nothing but a black circle containing many concentric circles. She picked it out and handed it to him.

  “The Chartres Labyrinth,” he read softly. “Circa 1200 CE. 12.89 meters in diameter, the path 261.5 meters. Known in Medieval times as the ‘path to Jerusalem.’ ”

  Then he realized what these people were doing. All his life he had encountered pilgrims, Christians who came from every part of the world to Jerusalem. Sometimes they formed wailing mobs carrying wooden crosses through the streets; occasionally little groups of old men in black crawled along the Via Dolorosa toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  “In the Middle Ages people couldn’t afford to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so they laid down a labyrinth in the cathedral floor, a maze with Jerusalem located symbolically in the center,” Maryse explained.

  “These people don’t look very Catholic to me.”

 
“They probably aren’t,” Maryse laughed softly. “It’s also said to be a ‘place of power’ by the New Age folks. People come from all over to walk the labyrinth.”

  “Have you walked it?” Ari looked at her.

  The question put her off balance. “Many times. But not for years now. We need to find Mortimer.” She took off down the aisle and Ari followed, examining the segments of the labyrinth in the floor as he went, passing the odd little knot of adolescents posing in its center. He wondered why they were chanting and giggling at the same time.

  Then Maryse veered into a side aisle where at last they found Mortimer’s small tour group. He was pointing up at a tall peaked window and talking rapidly to a dozen or so people who looked to be Americans bundled up against the cold as if on a skiing holiday. They were sleepy and inattentive; a few held GeM cameras over their heads to catch a blurry picture or two of a window they would never be able to identify again.

  “The Zodiac Window,” he said cheerfully. “Shows the peasantry doing their seasonal work, interspersed with the twelve signs of the Zodiac in their proper order but one. Not quite right, you know. Major problem with this window.”

  “And what is the problem?” Maryse called out in a surprisingly high, clear tone that Ari had not heard before.

  Obviously unused to questions, Mortimer looked startled for a moment and then gave Maryse that ample smile of his.

  “The ox, my dear. The ox. Taurus. Not in his proper place, you see? The twins have taken his place. Gemini.”