“Terry Brennan meticulously crafts stories of intrigue and action. His ability to weave archaeological and historical detail into a riveting plotline is simply amazing. Both The Sacred Cipher and The Brotherhood Conspiracy could step off the front page of any newspaper tomorrow. You’ll find them captivating!”
—MIKE DELLOSSO,
author of Fearless and Frantic
“The Brotherhood Conspiracy weaves a beautifully intricate web of intrigue and suspense. Painstakingly researched with powerful characters, it takes the reader on an exciting and thought-provoking adventure. Brennan brilliantly meshes an internal struggle of faith with an epic story about a world on the brink.”
—DAVID E. STEVENS,
former Navy commander and F-18 fighter pilot, author of Resurrect
The Brotherhood Conspiracy: A Novel
© 2013 by Terry Brennan
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Scriptures quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Apocrypha quotations from the Good News Translation [with Apocrypha]—Second Edition, copyright 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.
Qur’anic quotations from The Holy Qur’an, translated by M. H. Shakir. http://hemaidy.zoomshare.com/files/english-quran-shakir-wb.pdf.
To my sisters, Pat and Kathie;
And to my brother, Butch—
your years were much too short.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prominent Characters
Prologue
Part One: Prophet’s Call
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Two: Sanctuary of God
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is no greater partner, encourager, editor than my best friend and wife, Andrea, who not only lived with me through the trials, tribulations, and occasional joys of writing this book, but who also walked with me over the four long years it took to bring this sequel to completion. Sweetie, I couldn’t have done it without you.
I owe a large debt of gratitude to our daughter, Meghan, who is a deft editor but, more importantly, helped me keep my female characters real and relevant to twenty-first-century women. Thank you also to her husband, Azizi, who was supportive of Meg’s time, and to our son, Matt, for his encouragement.
Thank you to the great team at Kregel Publications, and particularly my editor, Dawn Anderson, whose probing questions always drive me nuts (what do you mean, motivation?) but always make the work so much better. Miranda and Cat—you are missed. And thanks to Greg Johnson and the team at WordServe Literary who have supported me from the beginning.
Without the Stephen Schwarzman Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Bryant Park in New York City, many of the pages in this book would be blank. Breathtakingly beautiful in its style and scope, if it’s not in the NYC “main” library, it probably doesn’t exist.
I can’t forget those who helped me get started: Marlene Bagnell, Wanda Dyson, Kathryn Mackel, Angela Hunt, and Nancy Rue. Thanks for giving me a good foundation—and hope. And to Mike Dellosso, Tim Shoemaker, and Adam Blumer—other writers who offered encouragement and support along the way.
Lastly, to my “guys”—Fred, James, Michael, and Mike—who regularly put up with my anxiety and insecurity but always impart wisdom; and to Michael O’Neill, who more than once helped me understand how to be a better man.
PROMINENT CHARACTERS
The team that discovered the Third Temple of God
hidden under the Temple Mount:
Tom Bohannon. Executive director of the Bowery Mission in New York City; former investigative reporter.
Joe Rodriguez. Curator of the Periodicals Room in the New York Library’s “main” building on Bryant Park; married to Deirdre, Tom Bohannon’s sister.
“Sammy” Rizzo. Director of the book storage and retrieval system in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Bryant Park at 42nd Street in New York City; colleague of Joe Rodriguez; a small person, a tad over four feet tall.
Dr. Richard Johnson Sr. Managing director of the Collector’s Club in Manhattan; former chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University; fellow of the British Museum.
Abu Gherazim. Foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority; a moderate Muslim leader.
Annie Bohannon. Tom’s wife of thirty years; photographer.
Avram Levin. Commander of the Aleph Reconnaissance Center in Jerusalem; known to his men as “the Hawk.”
Baqir al-Musawi. President of Syria.
Bill Cartwright. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; President Whitestone’s longtime friend and accountability partner.
Brandon McDonough. Provost of Trinity College, Dublin; expert in biblical archaeology and Richard Johnson’s boss at the British Museum.
Chaim Shomsky. Chief of staff to the prime minister of Israel.
David Posner. Deputy director of Mossad, Israel’s international intelligence and special operations agency.
Eliazar Baruk. Prime minister of Israel; lives in Tel Aviv.
Holy One, or Effendi. Old man of the desert; reclusive leader of the Prophet’s Guard.
Jonathan Whitestone. President of the United States; Republican; evangelical Christian, from the state of Texas.
Kallie Nolan. Masters candidate in biblical archaeology; frien
d of Sammy Rizzo; assisted the team in finding the Temple.
King Abbudin. Ruler of Saudi Arabia, sixth of the Saudi kings.
Leonidas. Informer, selling secret intelligence to radical Islamists.
Levi Sharp. Director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security force.
Lukas Painter. Director of Mossad, Israel’s relentless and feared international intelligence agency.
Mehdi Essaghir. President of Iran.
Moishe Orhlon. Israeli defense minister.
Ronald Fineman. Messianic rabbi and custodian of Jeremiah’s Grotto.
Rory O’Neill. Commissioner of the New York City police department.
Sam Reynolds. Career diplomat of the U.S. State Department; assisted the team that found the Temple.
Moussa al-Sadr. Imam; founder of the Lebanese militia that became Hezbollah; after thirty years in hiding, emerging leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
PROLOGUE
1978
Tripoli, Libya
The night air smelled of dead fish and diesel. The waves of the Mediterranean falling against the dingy gravel beach muted the faint sound of running feet. No moon marked the team’s passing. Their lives depended on being invisible.
This was blood work. Close, messy, fatal.
They ran through the shadows between the Esso refinery’s flashing scarlet lights and the dark parade ground of the women’s military college, best known for training Qaddafi’s female bodyguards.
They were four, covered head-to-foot in black, only their eyes visible through the holes of the hood. The leader had cold, blue eyes.
No insignias, no uniforms, no ID, no names. If they were caught, or killed, they would not be identified.
They ran under an oasis of palm trees, across a vulnerable, flat, open space, and then stopped short of a small parking lot, a stone garage protecting them from view of anyone on the other side.
Thirty minutes total. This close to the Libyan coast, the sub wouldn’t wait any longer. Get it done and get out, or get dead.
The main building was on the far side of the parking lot, across a stretch of lawn. The director’s wife grew roses, surrounding the mansion with sweet perfume.
The refinery director and his family were on a hastily arranged holiday. Qaddafi had commandeered their lovely home once again—far from prying eyes in the capital—to celebrate his son’s birthday with those he trusted, and those he wanted to influence. He was here, tonight.
Pointing to the right, the leader broke his team into two pairs, each inching toward a corner of the garage. Night birds sang in the treetops, French tamarisk wrestled to mask the power of massed rose bushes. The leader and his partner approached the left corner of the garage and raised their silenced Glocks.
And came face-to-face with the muzzle of a rifle.
The other soldier must have hesitated for a moment . . . only a split second . . . surprised by these two ghosts in black. The leader put a bullet between the soldier’s eyes before he could blink. They ran through the small parking lot, clogged with stretch limousines, as the other team came around the right side of the garage and snapped C-4 incendiary devices to the gas tanks of the parked limos.
Through a grove of date palms and carob trees that blocked the garage from the view of the main house, they ran up behind a shoulder-high hedge of Phoenician juniper. Across an expansive, manicured lawn sat the director’s mansion, about a hundred meters away, the rear terrace aglow from the multicolored paper lanterns surrounding its outer edge.
Joined by the other two soldiers, the squad edged along the hedge until they had a clear view. There were three groups of men on the terrace, all—with the exception of one man—wearing kaftans and kaffiyehs, the robe and headdress common to Arab men. One group was seated in a semicircle, the other two groups stood at each side. In the middle of the seated group was Qaddafi, a thin, ascetic-looking man dressed in a long, flowing, golden robe, with a small, embroidered, round golden cap on his head.
To his left, in stark contrast, sat a black-robed imam, a black turban on his head, his jet black beard visible against Qaddafi’s golden splendor, even at this distance. Their target—not Qaddafi, but Imam Moussa al-Sadr, religious leader of the Shi’ites of Lebanon, founder of Amal, meaning hope in Arabic, the fourteen thousand–strong militia wing of al-Sadr’s Movement of the Disinherited . . . enemy of Israel.
Their orders were simple. Kill al-Sadr. Across the Mediterranean, twenty-five thousand Israeli troops poured into southern Lebanon as part of Operation Litani. The invasion was both in retaliation for the thirty-seven Israeli citizens massacred four days earlier by eleven Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a bus in a daring, daylight raid near Tel Aviv, and to root out the terrorist base camps, like those of Amal, that spawned these agents of terror.
The Israeli commando leader didn’t know why al-Sadr ventured into the lair of Qaddafi, his bitter enemy. It didn’t matter. He had his orders, to snuff out the life of this enemy. He would obey. Or die trying.
The team’s two shooters extricated and assembled the pieces of their Remington M40A1 heavy barrel sniper rifles from their backpacks. Silencers would decrease the accuracy of the rifles. Night-vision scopes, the light on the terrace, and the training of the shooters and their spotters, would help. Still, the leader would have preferred another fifty meters closer.
Two muzzles were pushed through the branches of the juniper hedge.
Just as children came running onto the terrace.
There were dozens of them, swarming around and through the three groups of men, some being lifted by waiting arms. In the midst of the seated group, three children, two boys and a girl, came forward and crawled up onto the lap of the man in the golden robes, bringing a radiant smile to his face. A fourth, another boy, slower than the rest, stood at Qaddafi’s knees and looked back and forth for a place to sit. But there was no more room on his lap or in his chair.
As the commando leader raced through his options, the black-clad cleric reached down, picked up the boy, and brought him close to the others on Qaddafi’s lap. Qaddafi reached out his hand and stroked the boy’s head.
The leader looked, left and right, at his shooters. They shook their heads. At this distance, even without the silencers, there was no shot without great risk of killing one or more of the children.
The clock was ticking. The incendiary devices, intended as a diversion for their escape, would explode in ninety seconds. The plan was to get the shot, then run—without concern for stealth—for the darkness of the parade ground, getting there as the cars exploded in the parking lot. With luck, attention would be diverted long enough for the team to reach the beach and the inflatable. If Libyan defense helicopters weren’t in the air quickly enough, they had a chance of reaching the submarine.
“If we don’t take the shot now, we’re out of time,” came a whisper from his left. The orders were clear. Eliminate al-Sadr. At all costs. The leader decided to wait. Ninety seconds and the bombs would go off. The children would be scared, they would run.
His men all looked in his direction. The leader held up his hand, flat, palm out. Wait.
In the silence, punctuated by the distant, muffled laughter of children, a soft breeze drifted off the Mediterranean, tasting like the sea. They waited for the explosion—the light, the noise, the confusion, the scrambling—to get their shot. They waited . . .
There was no audible or visible alarm. No claxon sounding, no searchlights reaching into the darkness. But from each side of the mansion, a dozen heavily armed soldiers came running—pinching in, straight toward their location. They were discovered . . . perhaps the dead guard was missed. At the same moment a phalanx of tall, beautiful warrior women ran onto the terrace and surrounded Qaddafi, rushing him from the terrace toward the house.
The shooter on the lieutenant’s right took a shot at al-Sadr . . . the one on his left responded. But the imam was moving. He put down the boy, and the first bullet ripped above his head. At the sound he dropped
into a crouch as two bodyguards surrounded him. One spun to the ground in a death dance. And al-Sadr was gone.
The leader tapped his partner on the shoulder, sending him into the dark to cover their retreat as the shooters squeezed off four shots each, emptying their magazines. Five Libyan soldiers fell to the grass. The leader tapped them on the shoulders and they followed the first soldier, leaving the unidentifiable sniper rifles in the top branches of the hedge, grabbing their Uzis as they ran.
More soldiers were joining the attack from the sides of the mansion and, while some of the first group dropped to a knee to return fire, the rest were rushing headlong toward the hedge. The leader swept the advancing soldiers with two bursts from his Uzi, then spun around and ran toward the parking lot. Which is when hell came to visit Libya.
Even the leader was surprised at the viciousness of the blast and the ferocity of the fireball that consumed the limos in the lot, blew the front off the garage, and sent a shock wave through the copse of trees that nearly knocked him off his feet. In the shock and blinding light, the leader pursued his retreating team, running as fast as his legs and his lungs could bear.
There was a pause in the shooting coming from the Libyan soldiers, as he hoped. Then the fireball fell back to earth, its bulbous, burning mass cut by two-thirds, and the resultant loss of light intensified the blackness of the night. In this momentary eclipse, the leader burst from under the trees and raced across the open space toward the parade ground. He knew one of his men was covering his retreat while the other two rushed on to free the inflatable and get it in the water. Perhaps they would make it.
First he heard shouts, then shots as bullets began buzzing past him like lethal bees released from a deadly hive. The bullets were too close.
In a split-second decision, he cut hard right, away from the parade ground. The sound of the Libyan’s automatic rifles seemed more distant. He ran harder. After only a few strides, he cut back to his left for an all-out sprint to the darkness. Then his body was ripped by a spray of bullets. Across his chest. From ahead of him. From his own.
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