Toad felt cold inside and out. He was used to the role of observer. Sometimes he felt as if he were not arms and legs and head, but just eyes, looking out at a world that he was not spatially a part of. He put no trust in people’s descriptions of things until he saw them himself. Now he saw under the lights the dead body of Catriel Levine and submitted to a reality he had only imagined. For an instant he felt like he was drowning—a sudden burning in his eyes, a contracting throat. She’d been remote, contemptuous; still, it felt like his own life had been lost.
The examiner covered the body and beamed his data to Toad. All the statistics of Catriel Levine’s mortality poured digitally into his GeM; he stared at the image on the screen and wondered why it had such power over him. He thanked the examiner and left for the briefing.
He went into a choked little conference room as a group of city police came out, grumbling about Shin Bet. GeM projections played on the walls: Kristall, Ari, and Miner were showing a schematic of the Cohen Brothers offices to a big white-haired man in an elegant suit. Another man Toad did not recognize sat looking desolate in a chair too small for him while two impassive Shin Bet operatives stood behind him.
Ari pointed at the wall and turned to the seated man. “When exactly did you leave your office for lunch?”
“I don’t know exactly. Do you know exactly when you had your lunch yesterday?” He was tall and trim with a grand chin, but the little chair made him look like a gangly child. He was also very unhappy.
Ari gave him a cool stare. “Then approximately.”
The man sighed and fingered his tie. “It’s hot in here.”
“It’s hot everywhere.”
“I left the office about 1130, actually. I had a lunch meeting with a client and was to meet with this man Tempelman at 1230, but my paging service rang to tell me he’d be late, so I stayed for another drink. Look, the police know all this.”
Kristall turned to one of the agents, who reported: “We’ve got onto the paging service. The call to them came from a woman—not Tempelman’s voice.”
“I don’t know who it could have been,” the tall man said. “My assistant takes her holiday every year at this time, so I’ve been handling my own appointments.”
“We’ve vacuumed,” said the agent, “so we have some leads.”
Kristall was impatient. “We’re done with you for now.” The two agents tapped the tall man on the shoulder and escorted him to the door. He turned. His face was reddening.
“Cate was my whole life. You find who murdered her.” He trembled. “You find him.”
“We’ll do our best,” Ari responded.
Toad leaned into Miner’s ear. “Who was that?”
“His name is Ivan Luel. He was the dead woman’s boss.”
In his mind, Toad saw Catriel’s body again and felt the stab of the bullets. He had never before connected with any human being, even in his imagination. This pain was new to him.
“Sefardi, tell us about the profile of the shooter,” Kristall asked.
Startled, Toad fumbled with his GeM. All at once an image of the perforated head and chest of Shimon Tempelman covered the wall. Toad manipulated the GeM and a luminous gridwork appeared over the shot pattern, the wounds describing a nearly perfect triangle.
He then superimposed a similar image of Emanuel Shor’s body, maneuvering the two images until they fell into line with each other. The distance between the gunshot wounds was virtually identical on both bodies. Finally, a bleak white picture of Catriel Levine overlay the other two, revealing the same pattern again. Toad looked down and said flatly, “It’s possible we’re dealing with the same shooter in all three cases.”
“What does the pattern indicate to you, Sefardi?”
“It’s common enough.” He paused, then coughed repeatedly, his hand over his eyes. Ari and Miner looked at each other questioningly, but Toad went on. “Anyone trained properly knows how to stop a subject this way—three shots across the mid-chest are instantly disabling. The shot in the head ensures a kill. It’s typical of IDF training, commando training, that sort of thing. Uncommonly good shooter, though.”
“And the gun?”
“Same nine-millimeter configuration, although the lab hasn’t said it’s the same weapon.”
“A remarkable shot. Astonishingly accurate,” the white-haired man muttered to himself, as if in admiration. A little louder, he asked, “Does this shooter fit profiles you’ve got?”
“We’re trying to get service records from the PA on Eagle,” Kristall said. “As backup, we’re looking through our own database of sharpshooters.”
“Where was Eagle during the shooting?”
“We don’t know, unfortunately. He went off our grid yesterday around midday and didn’t surface till this morning. But he disappeared near Ramla, which isn’t far from here.”
“Then you have no fix on this case except the possibility of Eagle?”
“For now, that’s true,” Kristall sniffed at the white-haired man. “But they’ve vacuumed thoroughly; I imagine the scene will be giving up some interesting data shortly. Meanwhile, Davan here will be keeping Eagle company on his jaunt to Rome.”
“Your vacuum cleaners might not be equal to this suspect.” The big man rose and gave Ari a sharp look. “As it happens, I’m flying to Rome myself. For the papal funeral. May I drop you at the airport? I have my own transport, but I can take you to your terminal.”
“That’d be very welcome, thanks.”
Everyone but Toad left the conference room. He opened his GeM and stared once more at the three corpses digitally overlain on the wall, at the black holes in the bare white skin. His throat cramped again. Coughing hard, he shook himself as if trying to stay awake in the middle of a long and desolate night.
Hotel St. Regis, Rome, 0630h
Maryse reached for the GeM on the night table and shut off the alarm. Again, she watched the cornices of the ceiling coming into focus as she remembered where she was.
She had dreamed of Glendalough, of the velvet-green valley and the rocks rising on all sides. She was a girl again, and there on the cliff a boy was climbing. He was not from the glen; of course, rock climbers came from everywhere to try the cliffs. It was that strange April when the weather turned hot, and she escaped the heat in a little cove of rock with a spring not far from the Priory. Trees like cascading robes veiled the cove so that she could see the valley without being seen. From here, Glendalough looked as it must have a thousand years before—the lake, the enigmatic forest pierced by the gray tower of the monastery.
It was said that St. Kevin himself had built the tower. A prince of Leinster, sick of the world at only fifteen, he had abandoned his lover, cast off his titles, and put on the hair cloak of a pilgrim. Wandering Ireland in search of a solitary place where he could devote himself utterly to finding God, he had come to this glen, to a cave in the cliff where, like St. Bruno, he lived in deep contemplation for seven years. He was tortured by the memory of Kathleen, the princess he had escaped, and her eyes of unholy blue. Still he sought his peace in the cave, waiting for the Lord, his only company the squirrels and birds who fed him with berries and fish from the vale below.
Word of this miracle spread and eventually reached Kathleen, who made her way to the cave and found him asleep. Quietly, she watched him, weeping, until the rising light woke him. At the sight of her eyes he struck out, flinging her from the rock and into the lake far below.
In Maryse’s dream, she saw a boy mounting up to Kevin’s cave. Even from far away, she could make out the brown cords of his arms and legs, the ribbons of muscle in his brown back, as he wrenched himself straight up the cliff. From her cove she had seen many climbers, admiring their daring—she herself did not deal well with heights—but most of them clambered slowly and deliberately, patiently gauging each handhold. This boy moved like a tawny animal, as if huntin
g the creatures that lived in the cracks of the mountain.
When he arrived at the cave, he sat for nearly an hour on a rock under the overhang, cross-legged, motionless, while Maryse gazed at him, frozen in fascination. He was grand, she thought—monumentally alone, like a young king on his throne.
It was a frequent dream. She wondered if she had really seen the boy climber at some time, or only imagined him. She didn’t know why the dream kept returning, why that distant face she had never clearly seen stirred her in her sleep, and why tonight she had dreamed it again and again.
Ari Davan told her he was a rock climber. Perhaps that was it. But she also remembered having the dream at the Carmelite house. The boy on the cliff long ago—he was the first that had awakened something in her. She had never seen him but once, and from so far away.
She wondered what Ari was doing, what his abrupt return home meant. Something had occurred to him there on the cathedral’s north porch, below the statue of St. Peter. They had worked out much more than either could have done separately. Now that she knew the stakes were so high, she resented his running off without a word, as if she were no longer needed.
The men she had known lived alone in those dark hollows. They felt they had to put everything right, to mend all uncertainties, to repair the broken world, all by themselves. Men were obsessed with finding answers—too often with war as the ultimate answer.
She remembered a morning when her father took her on a long walk—so long they hadn’t returned until the evening. Unlike Kane’s battles with the forest of Glendalough, Ian Mandelyn’s walks were contemplative, slow, centered on ruins like the remains of the old chapels that had grown up around the cult of St. Kevin and then crumbled. They would take a lane like a cleft in the crowded trees and there, buried in the moss, would be an old foundation, the worn stones thrown down by the Danes or the English or just storm and time. Her father loved sketching the ruins, and she would play on them until it was time to go home.
The longest walk was soon after her mother left them, and she sensed that morning’s walk would be different.
After several hours, they had stopped by the road that entered the vale of Glendalough and, after some poking through the hedges, her father found a slab of stone with a curious engraving—a labyrinth of concentric circles. He told her that it was very old, much older than the remains of St. Kevin’s chapels, and that its meaning had long been forgotten; but he thought it might have something to do with the planets navigating their circles through the sky, with puzzlement over their motiveless turning, and with the need to understand the end from the beginning. Whoever carved the labyrinth, he had said, had no more answers than we do—only faith in the order of the heavens.
The light grew, bringing her back to the present, and soon she could hear the scramble of hotel people in the corridor outside her room, bringing breakfast to the guests. It was the day of the Pope’s funeral; the hotel was filled with dignitaries, and they were all taking their coffee and rolls at the same time. The smell of food got her out of bed.
She dressed and went down to the breakfast room, where she worked over her report on the GeM. She wanted to be ready for Kane when he arrived. Photos of the scene that morning when the Pope blessed the consignment that was heading to Lebanon. Close-ups of the white vans. Bills of lading filed with the Vatican charities office and signed by Chandos. Emails from the Antonine school in Besharri. The transcript of a phone conversation with the headmaster.
At length, she snapped the lid shut and sat back to drink her coffee. There was more she wanted to discuss with Kane. More than an icon had been taken from the Sancta Sanctorum.
The glory of the Lord departed from the house because of the men that devise mischief, and give wicked counsel in the city.
The city is the cauldron…it shall be laid waste, the altars made desolate. Desolation and war shall sweep the land of Israel.
Near Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel, 0730h
In the swift, silent car, seated next to the President of Interpol, Ari tried to quell his nerves by focusing on the job—after all, the man was only giving him a friendly lift.
“That’s a heavy coat,” Kane observed, smiling. Ari had determined he wouldn’t freeze in the European cold this time, and carried his new anorak with him.
“It’s like winter in Rome.”
“Yes, unseasonably cold.”
So Ari got to talk about the weather with David Kane, and that was all. He could see the Airport City around them; soon, he would be on his way. But then Kane spoke:
“Davan, is it? I understand you connected with one of our agents in Rome this week. Mandelyn?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of her?”
“She seemed very knowledgeable, very avid to find the item she was looking for.”
“So she let you in on that, did she?”
Ari wasn’t sure, but perhaps he had just made trouble for Maryse. However, Kane was still smiling, his eyes on the outline of the driver beyond the dark glass wall in front of him.
“It’s important to our case, too,” Ari replied. “We need to know all we can about the connection between our murders and the…events in Rome.”
“Naturally. It’s an odd connection—those rings, that DNA business. What do you make of it? Any theories?”
He thought about opening up his theory to Kane, but it would take time—and it was presumptuous. Kristall wouldn’t like it.
“Well, sir, right now my job is to track Eagle, because he’s our best lead.”
“As you say. You know what he might be carrying.”
“Yes.”
“Best not to disturb him on the flight, then.”
Ari chuckled, then realized Kane was no longer smiling.
“I had my doubts about allowing him on a commercial airliner with that thing,” Kane said. “Extremely unlikely that Eagle plans to do any mischief in transit—he seems methodical, and there’s enough money likely to be waiting at the other end to dissuade anyone from suicide, right?”
Ari thought the topic morbid and said nothing.
“But there’s always a risk,” the big man answered himself, and looked out the car window. “Mandelyn is back in Rome.”
“She is?”
“I’m meeting with her before the funeral.”
“I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing her.”
“No.” Kane fell silent again as the car approached a secure entrance to the air terminal. He tapped on the glass and the driver stopped the car so Ari could get out. Ari sat for a moment without moving.
“Mr. Kane, you asked me if I could connect these dots.” He paused, then went on. “Have you ever felt you could see something so clearly, something no one else could see—and if you didn’t share it, you’d go crazy?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s something very important going on here. Possibly a plot to destroy the Dome of the Rock.”
Kane frowned passively out the window, then turned to Ari. “Go on.”
“Point one: Shor in Haifa and Chandos in Rome die the same day, both wearing rings with identical inscriptions—a Biblical verse about the coming of the Messiah. Point two: Shor carries a postcard of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem with the same verse handwritten on the back. Point three: DNA proves that Peter Chandos belongs to the family of the cohens, the ancient priests of Israel who were the only people allowed to officiate in the Temple. Finally, Shor, Levinsky, and Catriel Levine were all of them mixed up with the Mishmar—a fringe group that wants to rebuild the Temple.”
Kane’s frown deepened. “And these points add up to a plot to destroy the Dome of the Rock?”
“The key might be the lattice. It can be made undetectable because it can be turned into any substance, but for the same reason it can also become a powerful explosive.”
/> “So anyone could carry it past the Flaming Sword—a fake tourist, for example—and detonate the device inside the Dome.”
“Anyone—or someone from the Mishmar.”
“And why eliminate Shor? Or Levine and Tempelman, for that matter?”
“To protect the plan. Nobody who knows about it can be allowed to live—the risk of a breach is too great.”
“You think Tempelman found out about it?”
“He might have been tailing the Levine woman. Or maybe he was going to spill what he knew to the patent lawyers.”
“Or maybe he was blackmailing someone.”
Ari smiled; apparently Kane knew Tempelman—and he was listening.
“It’s tantalizing,” Kane said. “So you think this organization, this Mishmar, is planning to destroy the Dome and rebuild the Temple in its place, and the killings are to keep the plan secure.”
Ari nodded.
“How do you see Eagle’s role in this?”
“I thought about that last night.” Ari leaned closer. “Two possibilities: he might have gone private, as a contractor for the Mishmar. Second, he might be a countermeasure. We know he’s PA intelligence—maybe they’re onto the Mishmar and working underground to stop them.”
Of course, there was a third possibility: that Eagle was himself the threat to the Dome—which would involve a big talk with Kane, and he didn’t how far to drag Maryse into this.
Kane seemed to consider Ari’s words as he watched an airliner rising overhead. “If your second theory is correct, then you ought to be on his side,” he said quietly. “The State of Israel would not want to deal with the consequences of an attack on the Dome.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Perhaps not fully. I met privately with the Prime Minister this morning. He’s young, he’s a saber rattler, and he doesn’t seem to appreciate that he’s no longer the only nuclear power in the Middle East.”
The Flaming Sword Page 9