The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies)

by Terry Brennan

  The secretary of state stood behind the chair, his hands gripping the wooden back. “Why wasn’t I consulted? How can you make such a radical shift in our support of Israel without discussing its repercussions with me, with State?”

  Whitestone looked up from the distressing budget reports. He lifted his right hand, pointing, and nodded his head at the chair. “Sit down, Ollie.”

  Some of the bluster slipped from Stanley’s voice as he stepped around the chair and followed the president’s directions. “You’ve kept me in the dark about too much, Mr. President. You and Cartwright.”

  Jonathan Whitestone knew this moment was on the horizon. Stanley had served his purpose. Now he stood in the way. Whitestone no longer trusted Stanley’s advice and didn’t seek his counsel about his dealings with Israel’s prime minister. The secretary was dead meat and didn’t know how far outside of the inner circle he actually was. This would not be pleasant. But it was necessary. Whitestone already knew who Oliver Stanley’s replacement would be—should the secretary resign.

  “There is no way we could remain silent on the tragic consequences of Israel’s raid against Iran’s Central Bank.” Whitestone said the words with a straight face and firm conviction. Lies came easier the longer you sat in this chair.

  Stanley stared hard at the president. “You know very well there is more than one way to make a statement like that.”

  Whitestone didn’t intend to give in to Stanley’s anger one inch. He caught the secretary’s stare and returned it a hundredfold.

  “Baruk would never have taken an action like that on his own,” said Stanley. “We both know you could just have easily confessed our own complicity in the attack on Iran. But that wouldn’t have played so well on the world stage, would it? You are taking a huge risk here, Mr. President. Cartwright is not your foreign policy advisor. I am. Or I should be. But Cartwright has your ear, and unfortunately, you’ve got a mall cop for your advisor.”

  Whitestone had run through tougher bullies than the secretary on his journey to the White House, and he wasn’t about to cower in front of Ollie Stanley.

  He lowered his head and looked over the top of his reading glasses. “Don’t push your luck, Senator. You wouldn’t be in that nice office of yours if it weren’t for the fifty-five electoral votes I needed from California. Cartwright has more geopolitical savvy in his eyebrow than you have in your whole department. And, Ollie—I would keep your personal thoughts about Iran to yourself. It would help your job security.”

  The secretary of state’s back stiffened, and his shoulders rolled back, helping him sit more erect in the chair. His eyes narrowed, and a hardness Whitestone had dealt with in Congress once again returned to his patrician features. Oliver Stanley looked like a stern schoolmaster about to issue a severe punishment. “If it’s my resignation you seek, Mr. President, you may have it. I no longer have your confidence—that has been clear for some time. And you no longer have any need for my state’s electoral votes. I’ll have the letter to you in twenty minutes.” He stood to his feet. “You value your reputation as a man of faith, a man of integrity. But I tell you the truth. No one can hide their true character in this office. What you do will find you out.”

  Stanley extended his right hand. Whitestone ignored it.

  “I don’t envy you that day. Godspeed, Mr. President.” Whitestone wasn’t sure if the words were a blessing, or a curse.

  8:00 a.m., New York City

  On a weekday, it was a terrorist’s dream—thousands of tightly packed bodies inching along the platforms in the depths of Grand Central Terminal at very predictable times. Each arriving train added to the masses snaking along the platforms, climbing the steps in patient rank-and-file. Over 750 thousand people passed through the ornate terminal each weekday, most in those few hours in the morning and evening when the metropolis filled and emptied with commuting workers.

  The platform of track 29 was much less crowded this early on a Saturday, but Connor couldn’t help but wonder what he would do if people started dropping like flies in front of him, some poisonous gas sweeping along the platform in his direction. An attack wasn’t as impossible as he’d once believed. His entire family had endured the threat of the Prophet’s Guard. He still had to purposefully stop himself from shying away from every Middle Eastern–looking man he saw. A shiver ran across his shoulders, and he shook his head. Get a grip.

  He walked up a ramp, through one of a rank of gates, and found himself in the exquisite expanse of the majestic train terminal celebrating its centenary. In the middle of the Tennessee-granite main hall was an octagonal information booth with “the clock” at its apex—the iconic symbol of Grand Central, now worth ten million dollars—and the place where thousands went to meet. Connor crossed the hall with its vaulted, zodiac-designed ceiling, Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse at one end of the concourse and a new Apple store at the other. He made his way through Vanderbilt Hall and out onto 42nd Street. And into the teeth of Manhattan’s frenetic pulse—even on a Saturday.

  On his way to meet Stew Manthey at the Collector’s Club on East 35th Street, Connor quick-stepped past the Pershing Square Grille, keeping pace with the human flow, and set off up the hill on Park Avenue. The Collector’s Club, under the direction of Dr. Richard Johnson Sr. until his murder just days earlier, was one of the nation’s most influential stamp-collecting societies. After retiring from the chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University, Dr. Johnson pursued his second passion. And it was in the vault at the Collector’s Club, secure and climate-controlled, that Abiathar’s scroll rested, along with the mezuzah, which had carried the scroll for over one thousand years.

  Connor found Manthey waiting on the steps of the stunning Baroque-style townhouse, a straw fedora on his head to ward off the August sun. Ringing the bell, Manthey greeted the matronly woman, dressed in black, who answered.

  “Hi, I’m Stewart Manthey, CFO of the Bowery Mission. I called earlier?”

  “Yes.” She looked like a schoolteacher, but her eyes were hard, unwelcoming. Over her shoulder, she glanced into the building’s lobby. A uniformed guard emerged from within. “Do you have some identification?”

  Stew and Connor offered their driver’s licenses.

  “Oh … you are Mr. Bohannon’s son?” she said to Connor, a faint remnant of English accent moderating the rebuke in her words. “The man who began our misery.” She handed Connor his driver’s license as if it carried typhus. “I’m sorry. You of all people would understand that, after all that has occurred, we must be more vigilant. Come in if you must.”

  They crossed the small lobby. The guard unlocked a heavy, but clearly new, wrought-iron gate, and they entered the rear room—the heart of the club’s philatelic collection. But the ranks of wooden file cabinets and packed bookcases attracted no notice. They turned right, stepped behind some heavy, velvet curtains, and faced the gleaming steel door of a massive vault.

  “Please turn around. Security, you know.”

  Backs to the vault door, Bohannon and Manthey both heard and felt the whoosh of air escaping from the sealed vault.

  “Come along.”

  In the dim, filtered light, they followed the woman to a metal bank of drawers. “It’s the mezuzah you wish to see … not the scroll itself?”

  She opened a large, square drawer, removed a leather shoulder bag, and laid it on a metal table in the middle of the vault. “If you push this button, it will put more light on the part of the table where you are working. Try not to destroy anything else while you’re here.”

  Manthey opened the leather bag and pulled out a cloth-wrapped cylinder. “They’ve been through a lot here.” Connor felt like Manthey was reading his thoughts. “Seems like a lifetime ago, but it’s only been a few months since Winthrop Larsen was murdered right outside.” He unwrapped the etched, bronze mezuzah. “That blast nearly wrecked this building. Then there was the break-in. Now Doc’s dead. No wonder we’re not very welcome. Here, why not test your the
ory.”

  Connor took the mezuzah in his left hand. With his right, he examined one of the end caps. About the girth of a mid-sized telescope, the mezuzah was an engraved metal cylinder, about four inches in diameter and about eight inches long. Along two-thirds of its length was a U-shaped metal bar, the open end snug against the outside of the container. When a scroll occupied the inside of the mezuzah, pulling on the metal bar would begin unrolling it.

  With a look toward Manthey, Connor applied some pressure to the end cap—first pushing up, to see if the end cap would separate from the rest of the cylinder; then gently twisting to see if it might unscrew. It didn’t budge. He looked down the length of the cylinder, trying to get a vantage point that might reveal evidence of a seal between the cylinder and the flange of the end cap that extended over the end of the cylinder.

  “It doesn’t look rusted,” said Manthey. Connor could feel him at his back, looking over his shoulder. “And I doubt it’s welded shut. How would anyone get a scroll inside?”

  Connor moved the mezuzah away from his body and held it at arm’s length.

  He put one hand on each end of the mezuzah, covering both end caps. Then he pushed the two ends toward each other. As he pushed, he applied pressure to twist the caps in opposite directions … clockwise with his right hand. When nothing happened, he changed direction, counterclockwise with his right hand.

  That’s when he felt the snap.

  Soft, subtle, but there nonetheless. With the snap, both end caps were released from their restraints and could spin freely on the shaft. But they didn’t come off. The knurled knobs on the ends of the center shaft prevented the end caps from moving completely away from the cylinder.

  “Halfway home,” Connor said, his voice low enough the conversation could have been with himself. He tried unsuccessfully to unscrew first one, then the other of the knobbed ends. He pushed on the knobs, trying to force them toward the center of the shaft. Nothing.

  “Not the same, eh? Good try,” said Manthey.

  Connor held the partially dismembered mezuzah in his hands and wondered what to do next. What was left? The knobs had to come off. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the knobs from all angles. Light emerged. He picked up a thin-bladed letter opener from the shelf behind him and inserted the blade into the narrow space between the shaft and the knob. When he felt resistance Connor stopped, then applied steady, growing pressure. And the knob separated from the shaft.

  “Good thinking,” said Manthey, raising his bushy eyebrows.

  The two end caps free from the shaft, Connor laid them down on the table’s surface, the inside, cup-like surfaces pointing up. From his backpack, he took one of the leather sprockets, unwrapped it, and placed it in the receptacle.

  “Perfect,” he said and turned his head toward Manthey. “Now what?”

  Manthey scratched at the bristly beard on his chin. “Well, let’s compare the symbols on the sprockets with the ones on the scroll. Even though the scroll is written as a substitution cipher, we may learn something. There was a guy over at the Met who your dad talked to early on about the Demotic symbols. Let’s see if we can get ahold of him.”

  13

  3:00 p.m., Jerusalem

  On Eliazar Baruk’s desk sat the day’s editions of Yedioth Ahronoth, the Tel Aviv tabloid that was the largest circulation newspaper in Israel; the English dailies Jerusalem Post and the left-leaning Harretz; along with the Hebrew daily newspapers Maariv and the right-leaning, free Israel Today. “When was the last time you saw the same lead story in all these newspapers?” asked Baruk.

  “Not often.” Levi Sharp, director of Mossad, Israel’s international spy apparatus, sat across the desk from the prime minister. “War probably. Today they have it all.”

  Israel was in a near-chaotic uproar. And Baruk and his government were tottering in the midst of the outcry.

  The spreading radioactive cloud raining death on a sizeable segment of Tehran’s population, caused by the botched action against the Iranian Central Bank, was enough to shake confidence in any government. But Baruk’s chances of survival had already been damaged by the shocking Muslim attack on Temple Mount only days prior and reports of a government insider turned traitor who assisted Hezbollah in its deadly attack. He was already crippled by the ongoing investigation into campaign financial fraud. Now blared from the front page of each newspaper was the realized fear of retaliation from Iran’s militant Islamic allies. Hezbollah rockets were flying into Israel’s northern settlements and creeping farther into the country.

  “How many have fallen so far?”

  Sharp glanced at the briefing paper in his lap, but the numbers had not changed since he first saw them thirty minutes earlier. “Three hundred forty into Kiryat Shmona alone. It’s a wasteland. Over one hundred into Haifa, and Hezbollah appears to be determined to move its shelling down the coast.”

  “Where’s Orhlon?”

  “Readying the IDF for a strike into Lebanon. Our planes are in the air, waiting for your order.”

  “It will look like desperation, trying to save my neck.”

  “Yes, it will. But we have no choice.”

  “No word on Shomsky?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We could use his conniving mind right now,” said Baruk. He ran his hand through the gray curls at the back of his neck. “Do we have enough votes?”

  “Not my expertise,” Sharp said of the pending no-confidence vote scheduled in the Knesset for the next hour. “But I doubt it. The US State Department has urged all American nationals to leave Israel at once. And the American president’s press conference was a killer.”

  The prime minister of Israel picked up the phone on his desk. It was answered immediately. “Send in the air force … you have my approval.” He hung up.

  “We’ll hold on the ground forces, for now. We’ll leave that decision to my successor. Let’s go.”

  9:30 a.m., New York City

  Despite the heat and humidity, even at an early hour Central Park pulsed with activity. Riders on racing bikes, dressed in a bright rainbow of team colors, flashed past serious runners, earnest joggers, and resolute walkers along the macadam roadways that were now rescued from automobile traffic. But the automobiles were still very much in evidence, the steady throb and occasional honk of snaking traffic on Fifth Avenue and cutting across the park on the 81st Street viaduct created an inescapable backdrop to life in Manhattan. But Connor’s mind was in another world.

  Rising above him was Cleopatra’s Needle, a seventy-foot red granite obelisk removed from the Egyptian port city of Alexandria by nineteenth-century explorer archaeologists who believed plunder was honorable. A resident of Central Park’s eastern fringe since 1880, when it took 112 days to move the obelisk from the Hudson River dock, Cleopatra’s Needle was the oldest man-made object in the park. Just steps north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this obelisk was one of three that were removed from Egypt—the others in Paris in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, and in London on the Victoria Embankment.

  “At least we paid for ours,” said Bob Ford, guardian of the Ancient Near Eastern collection at the Met, as he led Manthey and Connor Bohannon to the knoll upon which the Needle looked out over Central Park. “The Khedive of Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha, was more than happy to swap the obelisk for the money he needed to keep his government afloat. William H. Vanderbilt donated $100,000 to secure the obelisk and transport it to New York.”

  “Dr. Johnson and your father … ah … contacted me a few months ago with … um … some questions about the Needle,” said Ford, stumbling with both his words and his footing on the steep hill upon which Cleopatra’s Needle perched. “I wasn’t able to help them much then, and I’m not sure how much help I can be now. But let me show you this.”

  Ford walked around the base of the obelisk to the west side—the side that was least weathered, where the markings were more distinct. He pointed to the base of the obelisk. “Those symbols look like yours
.”

  Connor pulled a piece of paper from the back pocket of his jeans, a copy of the symbols he and Manthey had found on the sprockets. He held it up against the symbols at the base of the obelisk. “Look at that … look at the way they repeat. Almost identical to what’s on the sprockets.” He turned to Ford. “But what does it mean?”

  Ford leaned back against the obelisk, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs framing his head. “I wish I knew. We have a lot of items at the Met with Demotic characters. But almost all of our samples are on shards of pottery or small swatches of parchment or papyrus. Nothing large enough to help break the Demotic puzzle. A group at the Oriental Institute has worked on a Demotic dictionary project for over forty years. The team has been led for decades by Dr. Roberta Smith. We send them images of all our stuff. So does almost every other museum in the world.

  “Earlier this year, the institute team announced it finally completed its task—cataloguing all the various meanings of all known Demotic symbols. The dictionary they completed is almost two thousand pages long. One letter has, I think, eight hundred different meanings.

  “I talked with Dr. Smith a few weeks ago, and she and her team were as excited as kids at Christmas. They were stunned when somebody sent them a copy of the scroll your dad discovered—it’s the largest single example of Demotic writing ever unearthed. If there is anybody who can help you figure out what you’ve got in your hands, it will be Dr. Smith and her team at the University of Chicago.”

  Connor’s hopes disappeared. “Chicago?”

  He had been sitting in the taxicab for more than an hour, and his nerves were ready to snap. The cab was against the curb on the southwest corner of the intersection at Fifth Avenue and 84th Street in Manhattan, its flashers on. It was in a no-parking zone, blocking a lane that should have been open to traffic, and naturally incurring the wrath, curses, and gestures of nearly every driver who had to swing back into traffic to get around the stationary cab.