The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  “Nearly a century earlier, the Kaffirs had come. The Crusaders. Here, in al-Quds, the sacred city, where Muslims and Jews and Christians had lived in peace for centuries, pouring through the Damascus Gate they came with their great horses and their great broad swords. The Muslims gathered on the Haram, the Temple Mount, to defend themselves. There the Crusaders slaughtered everyone—children, their mothers, everyone—ten thousand Muslims. Because many of them had swallowed their gold to protect it, the Crusaders tore their bodies open. As they entered the Dome of the Rock on their horses, they rode in blood up to their knees, as if the shrine were a cup of wine.

  “Then they fell on the Jews in their great synagogue and burned it.

  “No one was prepared for this. The believers who survived were banished from their homes; the Crusaders brought wives and their servants and set up their own kingdom and built fortresses.

  “In their ignorance they thought the Dome was the Temple of Suleiman, so they didn’t destroy it—but they lived like swine in al-Aqsa and desecrated the Mount by stabling their horses there.

  “Our people were helpless. The sacrilege was strong, and the people were weak. There was no unity, only disarray.”

  The old man coughed hard, and Amal gave him water which he struggled to drink.

  “But the holy Rock cried for deliverance,” he went on. “The Rock from which the Prophet, peace be upon him, ascended to the presence of Allah. And the cries were heard. The Lord sent a deliverer.”

  “Yusuf bin-Ayoub,” Amal said, nodding.

  “Yes. He was known as an-Nasir, the Eagle of God, and fighting under golden banners trimmed with eagles, he destroyed the Crusader army and descended on the Christians who still held Jerusalem.”

  “Nasir,” Amal echoed. He grinned at his father. “Like my brother.”

  “Like your brother.”

  The room was cooler and nearly dark now, as Amal could no longer see his father’s face. He pictured the Arab army like a golden ring around the city, ready to grasp the Kaffirs by their necks, and the great king with his brother’s name commanding them.

  “And he slaughtered the infidels?”

  “No, he did not. He offered the Christians safety if they would yield the city to him, which they did rather than die. And he entered the city through the Damascus Gate, just as the Crusaders had done—but he came in peacefully, swearing the Christians would not be harmed and their holy places would remain open. It was the twenty-seventh day of Rajav, 584 years to the day from the Prophet’s ascent to Heaven.

  “The great sultan removed the images the infidels had set up in the Dome of the Rock and cleansed it with rose water and rose petals in memory of the bodies of the thousands of Muslims martyred there.”

  Hafiz closed his eyes against the darkness. His voice had become a murmur. Worried at the grating sounds of his father’s breathing, Amal shook him gently and coaxed him awake.

  “Why are you telling me this story? You haven’t told me stories since I was a child.”

  “Because it is your story,” the old man murmured, drowsing. “And it’s time you knew it. It is the story of our family, of the sons of Yusuf al-Ayoub—of Saladin.”

  “Saladin? We are of the family of Saladin?”

  “He was called Salah ad-Din, the Justice of the Faith, and from the time he held the world in his hand until now, the family of Ayoub watch over the sacred temple, to prepare for the Day.”

  “The Day of Requital.” Hafiz grasped for the water again, drank, and smiled in the dark at his younger son. “When Prophet Isa—Jesus of Galilee—returns to the temple of Suleiman with the army of Heaven to carry out the salah, the judgment of all mankind.

  “Many false Saladins have arisen since—madmen like the Mahdi of Khartoum, or fools like Nasser of Egypt or the murderer Baghdadi of Daesh or Saddam of Tikrit, whom the Americans hanged.” The old man chuckled weakly. “Saddam Hussein saw himself as the new Saladin. But none of these could hold the world in their hands.”

  “Father, what must we do to watch over the sacred temple?”

  Hafiz’ voice sank to a whisper. “Your brother…Nasir…it is his place. May he be the last.”

  “And how must we prepare for the Day?”

  But the old man was tired. Amal knew he would have to get him into bed, that the story was over for now, and he toiled up the stairs, nearly carrying Hafiz to the couch in the upper room. With the window shutters closed and the little cooler buzzing, the room was bearable, and Hafiz’ hands and feet were unnaturally cold. The warmth would be good for him.

  Amal pulled off the old man’s slippers and laid him on the bed, then sat next to him until the quiet snoring grew regular. He switched on the viewscreen on the wall and muted it, settling back to watch for a while. Arabic titles ran rapidly over images of war preparations. Israeli warplanes cruised diagonally across the screen. Soldiers of the lands surrounding Israel marched past, their oily new guns at the ready; sleek missiles rattled on trucks across the desert; banners of red, green, and black flew. Amal had seen images like these all his life, but there was one thing he had never noticed before: the black eagle on every banner.

  His father stirred next to him. “Amal.” His eyes were still closed. “You asked me how to prepare for the Day.”

  He paused; Amal waited and at last decided Hafiz had gone back to sleep. But then he heard him murmuring.

  “There’s a poem. Hafiz al-Shirazi… Rose petals let us scatter… And fill the cup with red wine… The firmaments let us shatter… And come with a new design.”

  Interrogation Room, Shin Bet Headquarters, Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1920h

  By seven o’clock, when Ivan Luel showed up for questioning, Toad knew everything about the man that phone and text records could tell, and by seven-twenty, he knew everything else.

  Sex, money, and influence—they summed up Luel’s life. The lawyer had talked a stream since he entered the room. His face glistened like a magazine cover; he had unbuttoned the two top buttons of his white silk shirt, and the way he sat on a green chair in the interrogation room revealed that fear was his signature emotion. Toad knew that Luel had women up and down the coast from Yafo to Haifa, women in New York, London, and Sydney. He also knew from the messages he had read that Luel could not speak to a woman without gaming her in a tone of voice that Toad had learned to recognize from years of interrogations; he had wondered idly why so many women were vulnerable to it. He now had no doubt, however, that Catriel Levine had not been among the vulnerable ones.

  Looking apprehensive, Miner sat in the corner while Toad questioned Luel. Yes, he had known about the lattice and its potential value. No, he had not been involved with Catriel’s work and was now frankly surprised that she had done what she did to secure the claims. Yes, he had lied about Catriel and himself—there was no engagement, it was all business—and self-flattery. No, he knew nothing about her ticket to America, and pouted in a bewildered way when he heard about it. And the less he knew, the more he had to say.

  “And Lambert Sable? What do you know about him?”

  Luel looked stupidly at Toad. “Sable? The Gemster? What everybody knows. You mean, the CEO of GeM, right?”

  He knew nothing about Catriel and Lambert Sable.

  Toad began to lose interest in Luel. The man was all surface, no purpose. Precisely the opposite of the person they were looking for. He tried to imagine the contempt Catriel Levine must have felt for Luel and enjoyed the imagining.

  While Luel babbled, Toad wondered what drained such a man of intelligence. He mused momentarily about the discovery of the MAO-A gene in Peter Chandos; was it really possible that some people might appear harmless and yet lack the gene for a normal human conscience? It would explain a good deal, he thought. The man seated in front of him seemed to have an overactive gene for superficiality.

  Toad glanced at Miner, whose gene
tic makeup was benign until paired with a woman of the same genetic makeup; combined carriers of Tay-Sachs disease, they would produce offspring doomed to an early and painful death. Then he thought about his own genes. What was there in the conjoined spirals of his DNA that had produced the cold unseen carapace he lived in?

  His thoughts turned to the person they really were looking for. Whoever it was played no games. No surface—all malevolent purpose. A rapid-fire killer. At once painstaking and quick, timed to perfection, this person carried out his operations as if performing the most delicate surgery.

  What struck Toad about the killer was the sterility of his work. Not a single biotrace at the Shor murder scene, except a hair that in his opinion had been planted. So far, no identifiable traces at the double murder scene at Cohen Brothers. Such a performance was not impossible, but required superior planning. Add the speed and precision of execution, and this killer became easily the most formidable opponent he had ever faced.

  Surfaceless. Traceless. In a way, invisible. Toad knew something about invisibility. All criminals sought it; it was their failure to achieve it that brought them down, and Miner and people like him had grown so sophisticated that nearly everything was now physically visible.

  What Toad knew about was psychological invisibility. To render the self unseeable—he had worked at it forever and understood the mechanism. The key was Edgar Allan Poe’s stolen postcard: hide where you are. Become faceless, unmemorable, put out no psychic signals at all. Stare at the floor in a lift; enter only doors that are open. Focus the mind on solitude.

  The more one is absorbed in the self, the more invisible one becomes, Toad realized. He himself was so completely captive to his own thoughts that the thoughts of others rarely entered in. And when it happened, the shadow of his own thinking soon covered the landscape again.

  He realized then he hadn’t heard anything Luel had said for ten minutes.

  Then Ari’s signal came across his GemPhone.

  “Please excuse me a moment,” he said and walked out the door. Luel turned to talk to Miner, who by now had also lost interest in the lawyer.

  “I’ve lost Eagle,” Ari was saying.

  “I’m not surprised,” Toad said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Go ahead.”

  “I lost him hours ago at the Pope’s funeral and I can’t get help. Everybody here is completely territorial. Now that the funeral’s over they don’t care about Eagle, but I don’t think he’s finished. You know what I need.”

  Toad did know, and he copied the coordinates Ari gave him as he took the lift to the underground communications room. He didn’t know the officers there, but it didn’t matter; Ari’s voice on the GemPhone was enough for them. Toad stood in the shadows of the darkened room as they brought up the day’s digital feed from one of the Eros-Z satellites, the government’s high-resolution eyes on the globe.

  Given the right coordinates in time and space, the imaging officer brought up an iridescent blur on an overhead viewscreen—the blur became a vortex of light, and Toad had the sensation of falling through the middle of a cyclone. Then, all at once, the image slowed into something recognizable: the vast piazza before St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The image was strangely bluish, but the audience that filled the piazza was visible as a squirming black mass flecked with red.

  “Why the blue cast?” Toad wondered.

  “The new camera sees through clouds, but they cause a shift in the color spectrum,” the officer replied absently. He was getting a fix on the north colonnade, which bloomed into focus so close that Toad could see police officers strung like a line of black ants along the top.

  “Can you see this?” Toad asked Ari over the GemPhone.

  A long pause that was filled with tinny, grunting music; then Ari answered. “Great. I’ve got it projected on the wall.”

  “Where are you?”

  Ari shouted over music. “I’m in the men’s room of a disco in the Piazza Navona.”

  The officer laughed. As he ran his finger over a small crystal-like pad, the image zoomed dizzily in and out. “What are we looking for?”

  Ari was counting audibly. “Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…there he is! Zoom in on the middle of the colonnade—the nineteenth person from the end.”

  The image telescoped over the head of a figure in black violet leaning immovably against what appeared to be a great statue. “Fast forward,” Ari commanded. They could almost see the figure’s rapid breathing as they watched for about a minute. Then all at once the man sprang to life, fired a weapon toward the crowd, and slipped under the canopy.

  “Back up! Mark him!” Ari cried.

  “Eagle,” Toad murmured.

  The officer swept his hand over another touchpad, backed up the image, and grabbed the figure inside a pulsing red circle. “Mark!” Toad knew that the computer had analyzed the figure to the millionth of a pixel and would recognize him even in a swarming crowd of people—so long as he stayed visible.

  But the red dot did not reappear. The image zoomed out and forward, faster and faster every second as the officer searched for it. The blue marble of the colonnade brightened and darkened as the clouds varied overhead, the funeralgoers vibrated at high speed like molecules under a microscope. The time code buzzed along: thirty, forty minutes, but no signal.

  Suddenly there was a loud ping from the computer and the red dot pulsed to life again; fifty meters or so from where it had disappeared, it emerged again from the east end of the colonnade. Toad watched in fascination as the man sauntered away from the Basilica through the square titled PIAZZA CITTA LEONINA on the screen.

  Ari exploded through the phone. “He walked right past me! See that van? I was inside that van at that moment trying to get some help!” Toad decided he meant the rectangular trailer parked alongside the pavement with cables running in all directions. It looked like a bacterium waving its tentacles at the tiny red intruder.

  Toad remembered that he had an interview waiting upstairs.

  “You’ve got your suspect,” he said softly into the GemPhone. “Mazel tov with that. I’m off to talk to Miner’s suspect.” And he shuffled to the lift.

  But then, glancing back into the interview room, Toad saw that Luel had reduced Miner to near catatonia and decided to leave them alone. He continued down the corridor toward his office.

  Surfacing Eagle had confirmed an idea in Toad’s mind. Of course. The killer was got up as a policeman. Unseeable, like himself. Part of the permanent security presence. Like a tree on the avenue or a cloud in the sky—just there, as he should be.

  Did a fake policeman trick Shor into taking the Chandos DNA sample and visiting his brother’s laboratory? What would cause Shor to commit aven and break the law unless he were trying to help the law? Who but a security person could get into Cohen Brothers’ locked offices without being challenged?

  Of course, that work had already been done. All of the security people in both locations had been carefully identified and interviewed, so the killer was good at insinuating himself into the flow, mixing with the others on the colonnade and then disappearing. He had to have precise information; thus, someone was feeding it to him. Toad knew that Eagle was well connected, so that fit; it would be interesting to know who exactly those connections were…particularly at the Vatican.

  Eagle had met with a lot of people in Rome. Toad had evaluated all of those he could identify—including Didi Mattanyah—but they might be worth a deeper look. He must have linked up with someone in particular. Who was networked between both the security conference of the prior week and the security for the funeral? Many of these would be obviously be the same people: the head of the Swiss Guards? the head of the Vatican detachment of Rome police? Who else? Who was commanding in this mysterious war?

  Toad found himself back at the lift and decided to drop into the black room again to chec
k on Ari’s progress.

  He walked into turmoil. Over the heads of the excited technicians, a vast grid of Rome onscreen was going dark, but a bright red signal was blinking rapidly across the city: it was a taxi. Ari’s voice could be heard shouting over the speakers, but not at anyone in the room—he was shouting at his own taxi driver. He was in pursuit.

  The red signal raced along a straight diagonal toward the lower right-hand corner of the map, the map twirling and zooming to track it. Suddenly it slowed and stopped. In the darkness the red circle filled with green light—the satellite was now tracking a heat signature. Eagle was on foot.

  “He’s stopped.” Ari cried. He was in traffic, well behind the signal. “Where is he? Where did he stop?”

  The officer punched up the location on the screen. PIAZZA SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO.

  “It’s the Holy of Holies,” Ari breathed.

  Global eManager Headquarters, Plano, Texas, 1200h

  “Lunch again, Lam?” Pastor Bob Jonas strode into Lambert Sable’s office, rubbing his hands. “What’s on the menu?”

  But Sable was grim. “We’ve got a serious problem.”

  The pastor looked around the office; it was virtually empty now. Photographs, mementos—everything was boxed up for Sable’s departure. The telescreen walls were blank. The only thing on the desk was Sable’s tablet.

  “What’s up?”

  Sable wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Our contact from Tel Aviv never showed up at the airport. I just found out she was murdered yesterday. We’ve lost control of 1317. Nobody knows what’s become of it—not the Israeli government, not Interpol—nobody.”

  Pastor Bob smiled and fell into one of the cream leather chairs. “Have you thought maybe that’s what the Lord wants?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The anti-Christ is destined to control the world through the ‘mark of the beast.’ If your little gizmo is part of prophecy, nothing y’all can do is going to change that.”