The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  “Two degrees.”

  “Ah. That helps. That helps immensely. I wonder if they have jam…” He rang for the attendant.

  “And how did you, uh, surmise it?” Ari muttered at him.

  The attendant came in and whispered into Mortimer’s ear.

  “No jam? Oh, well. After all, it’s not a hotel. And here’s our friend Maryse Mandelyn.” Mortimer got to his feet as Maryse came in, shivering from rain and wind. Beneath her topcoat she wore new denims and a cream shirt, and she carried a black travel bag. She lightly embraced Mortimer and took the third chair, with a quizzical smile for Ari. Belatedly, he stood and then sat again, confused.

  “Brioche, dear?” Mortimer asked, offering her a plate. “Thank you for coming back. Thanks to both of you. I think it’s time we cleared a few things up.” He nodded to Ari.

  “You asked how I surmised that there were two shooters? Couldn’t be simpler. Your shooter couldn’t be Peter Chandos, if Peter Chandos was dead in Rome in the morning and committing murder in Haifa in the afternoon.”

  He took a sip of the cappuccino and dabbed his lips with his napkin.

  “Now, the police had swept the Sancta Sanctorum twice—the previous night and a couple of hours before the service—then they closed off the chapel. No one could have been inside; ergo, your unknown shooter must have entered the chapel with the Pope.”

  “Someone who looked like Chandos?” Maryse asked.

  “Exactly. Chandos was already dead and had been for roughly two hours.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mr. Davan here told me. There was a two-degree difference in body temperature between Chandos and Zacharias. One degree per hour…”

  Maryse exclaimed to Ari, “That’s why you wanted time-of-death data.”

  Mortimer nodded. “I wasn’t clear at all how he worked it out, so I had to visit the Sancta Sanctorum myself. Hadn’t seen it for many years. Must have been tricky for him—to get inside with the police in the morning, lie in wait for Chandos to make his final inspection at 9 o’clock, murder him, get out again, and dress up like the dead man in time for the big ceremony.”

  “So,” Ari was fascinated. “The Unknown got inside in police disguise and waylaid Chandos. Then he was free to accompany the Pope and kill him too. But how would he get out? The police stormed the building. Unless…”

  “Precisely,” Mortimer smiled at Ari. “Under his voluminous clerical robes, he still wore his police uniform. He had only to disrobe, hide in the San Lorenzo Chapel, slip in among the police who were running about like madmen, and leave with them.”

  “Then catch a flight to Tel Aviv,” Ari continued.

  “To drop an eyelash next to the body of your unfortunate scientist. A busy day for our unknown adversary,” Mortimer chuckled, slipping extra sugar into his coffee. “Brings to mind a film I once saw about a man who was betrayed by the DNA in his own eyelash. There are no new ideas.”

  Maryse broke in. “From a distance, the look-alike might have fooled the crowd, but how did he fool the Pope? Chandos worked with him every day.”

  “That’s where some of your library research came in, Maryse. Your findings on the Chandos family after the war.”

  “But I didn’t find anything about the Chandos family after the war. A page was missing.”

  “That is exactly the finding that matters. All the most recent information on Sir John Chandos and his children—gone.”

  Ari picked up on this; he now knew that Mortimer, like Toad, had already guessed. “Chandos had a relative who looked like him—whose DNA matched his. Who resembled him enough to fool everyone. A brother?”

  “Undoubtedly. A brother—a twin—who is meant to remain incognito to the rest of the world. So like they were, no mortal might one from other know. Macaulay. Otherwise, why remove all trace of him from the records of the Chandos family?”

  “So the Unknown killed the Pope.” Maryse was relieved and troubled at once. “And his own brother?”

  “To vary Orwell a bit,” Mortimer said as he finished the last of the brioche:

  “Poor little Willy is crying so sore,

  A sad little boy is he,

  For he’s broken his little brother’s neck,

  And he’ll have no jam for tea.”

  Kibbutz En Gedi, Israel, 0930h

  The members of the Mishmar, seeking shade, trailed sorrowfully away from the graveyard and crossed the little desert road that led to the kibbutz meeting place, a pavilion with a corrugated metal roof supported by wooden pillars. Curtains of mosquito netting hung chaotically from the roof.

  Even under the pavilion, Nathan Levinsky suffocated in the heat. The funeral of his only daughter had given no consolation. Bolts of anger blinded him, gutted his eyesight, reduced his reason to ashes. She was gone, murdered by a Mohammedan brute as so many others had been. Emanuel gone, Catriel gone. Murdered.

  He struck his forehead with his fist. He struck it again and again. All the threats of the prophets of death to the heathen burned within him—it flamed through his frail nerves again as it had against the swinish Russians in his boyhood—it beat against his ears. I will tread on them in my anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my clothing.

  It was time and past time for God to act. Some said He was waiting for the Jews to cleanse the Mount and show that they were ready for the Messiah. Others said He would act in His own time.

  But perhaps God had already acted.

  With abrupt insight, Levinsky looked up at the sky at the sun, the white fire of God. He knew God had put in his own hands, into Nathan Levinsky’s hands, a flaming sword that could not be extinguished. A sword that could burn out the hearts of those murderous dogs who had taken everything from him.

  Yom Kippur, the day of settling scores, was only one day away. He whispered the words of Isaiah from memory: For the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.

  His eyes hot, he now looked around at the miserable little crowd of temple faithful keening in a circle, washing their hands in a pail they were passing from one to another. Rachel Halevy’s hands were dripping with water. Levinsky could use these people to excise the abomination from the Temple Mount. But not with water—only fire would cleanse their hands. They would carry fire gladly in their hands to do so. And if God had put such a miracle in his hands, why not use it?

  The pail came to Levinsky. He still felt in his fists the dust from a stone he had placed on his daughter’s grave and would not wash it off. Jules Halevy muttered gently in his ear, “You must wash.” He would not. Halevy insisted. Levinsky reached up and took Halevy by the shirt and pulled him down to his face.

  “I will not,” he whispered. “I cannot. The filth remains on me until they pay for my daughter and my brother. They must pay. It is time. You know it is time.”

  He felt the grating of Halevy’s cheek and his stale breath as he pulled away. His friend looked stonelike at him.

  Levinsky hissed, “God has put the flaming sword in our hands. You have talked and talked for years, doing nothing but taunting the authorities. They would arrest you if you were not an academic. They don’t know you are a fake.”

  “A fake?”

  “Yes. You make meaningless gestures, laying a cornerstone for a temple you know you will never see. There is no plan, there is no goal. No serious work. Your crazy wife knits vestments for a nonexistent priesthood; you march in the streets, but only on your day off. My Casha, my brown-eyed one, she died because you have been playing the fool.”

  He grasped Halevy again with both hands.

  “She died for the Temple. And you? You are still living, washing your hands in filthy water, and still you have no plan.”

  “Nathan, it must be done intelligently,” Halevy protested.

&n
bsp; “God has been working while you have played the fool. He has put the sword in our hands! Now! Now is the time.”

  Halevy hugged Levinsky and wrenched him from his seat at the same time; they walked together into the sun away from the mourners, who stared at them as the two men whispered violently at each other. Rachel stood up, shading her eyes from the sun. The move alarmed Levinsky’s two bodyguards standing under a wilting terebinth several meters away, but Levinsky waved them away.

  Halevy insisted, “We can buy the Mount. I know the royals are interested. We can still take the American offer—there will be a delay, that’s all…”

  “You’re not serious,” Levinsky retorted. “You have never been serious. You want your hands on billions, fine. But billions will not buy their rotten hearts—you know that. The only thing they respect is blood.”

  “I miss Casha too, but…”

  “Miss her? Miss her? She has not gone on a trip, Yuli. She is dead. They killed her! She was worth a billion of them, and a billion of them will pay.” The heat soaking his eyes and face, Levinsky stumbled back toward the pavilion, but Halevy caught at him.

  “I will put it to them,” Levinsky whispered hoarsely in Halevy’s face. “And at least one of them will go up the Mount. One of them will—it only needs one. You’ll see. I have a GeM left, a working prototype. It will be so easy for one boy just to speak into it, to say one word—one word—and God will take him and all of us into His hand.”

  Levinsky turned to the mourners, now standing silently and watching them. Any one of a dozen boys among them would volunteer without a thought, he knew. He stared into their thin brown faces, streaked and unshaven in their mourning, and thought with satisfaction of their young bones melting like candle wax as the Dome turned to vapor and disappeared into the sky.

  Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Fiumicino, Italy, 0930h

  David Kane hauled himself into the small jet and took off his wet coat. Grimly, he surveyed Maryse and Ari, who were already seated in the cabin, and then motioned out the jetway for the two pilots to come aboard. He flung shut the curtain that separated the cabin from the cockpit and took his seat facing Maryse.

  “The tower says the weather will break in a few minutes; we’ll take off then,” he told them. “In the meantime, let’s talk.”

  Ari was still cowed by the big man with the brush-cut hair, although Maryse seemed familiar enough with him. It was Kane’s airplane. Everywhere the insignia of Interpol—a world globe impaled on a sword—on the curtains, on the fawn leather seats, stamped in gold on the wooden trim.

  “The airport police have turned up nothing,” Kane launched in. “The taxi has been impounded. They’re going over it now, but the word is that it’s so filthy they’ll find the DNA of a thousand people.”

  “We’re looking for only one trace, though,” Maryse spoke up. “The unknown Chandos. Peter’s twin.”

  “If there is such a person,” Kane replied.

  “There must be. It explains everything.” Maryse leaned in energetically. “Fatima Chandos insists that the killer could not have been her husband, as does everyone who knew him. It explains how this man’s DNA could be found at the murder scene of Emanuel Shor. It’s the same man who’s been killing ever since—the two people in Tel Aviv, the Palestinian in Rome last night. From what I understand, it’s the same gunman in each instance.”

  Kane settled back in his chair thinking. Ari waited for him to say something, but there was silence. He didn’t know how welcome his own words might be in this exchange that seemed almost father-to-daughter. An odd connection existed between these two, he realized, between this delicate, artistically-minded woman and this old Royal Marine: he recognized the massive crowned-lion ring Kane wore.

  Feeling out of place, he half-wondered why he was on this plane. Maryse had already arranged to fly with Kane—she was going to investigate the transports that had been sent to Lebanon. Now, for them both, there was an even more compelling reason to go: no records existed of any sibling of Peter Chandos. Every vital record from Rome to Lebanon listed Peter as the only child of one Rafqa Chandos, with paternity unknown.

  Telephone calls to the hospital where Peter was born and to the government of Lebanon had turned up nothing. Rafqa herself had been an only child, thus no near relatives. Even Fatima Chandos, who had been reached at her parents’ home, was astonished at the suggestion: there was no brother, there had never been a brother.

  Only Peter’s mother would know the truth. Ari had to talk to her. The problem—Rafqa Chandos had suffered a series of strokes, the worst one a week before, when she learned of the death of her son. According to the doctors, she was not likely to be of much help. Still, there was a chance, it was the best lead he had, and the flight would bring him closer to home. There was no reason to stay in Italy, now that they had lost track of the Unknown.

  An Interpol car had come for them, Mortimer had waved them away from the gates of the Palace of Malta with a condescending grin, and they were at the door of the plane almost before Ari could think through why he was going. On the way, Maryse had worked agitatedly over her GeM, lips tight, studying the little screen as she entered one combination after another of the words Chandos, marksman, commando training and a dozen others, trying to wring out of the Internet any trace of the still-theoretical twin brother of Peter Chandos. Nothing. In the meantime, his own thoughts became more and more jumbled; now he needed to pour them out to someone.

  Once before, the President of Interpol had listened to him, so he leaped in. “I’m afraid nothing’s really been explained.”

  Kane’s head turned abruptly, and Ari swallowed. “You’ll remember our talk yesterday morning, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “The whole thing is still as fantastic as at the start. Why would one man—obviously a highly trained killer, probably a black-ops person—successively kill his own brother, the Pope of Rome, an Israeli geneticist and his lawyer niece, the security chief of Technion, and a secret policeman from Palestine? Ruling out a psychopath, we have utter disconnection—each case is highly suggestive by itself, but together they make no sense.”

  Kane grunted. “Could be a mercenary.”

  “In whose pay?”

  “Maybe he likes the work. Wasn’t it one of your reports that found this man Peter Chandos was genetically wired for violence? If he does have a brother, he’d share the genes, wouldn’t he?”

  Ari wished he had Toad at his side.

  Then the pilot’s voice interrupted them. “The weather hold has been lifted and we will leave now. We are just under three hours to Beirut. Please prepare for takeoff.”

  Anemic sunshine brightened the wet, cool glass of the windows. The plane shuddered toward high speed and vaulted into the air. Soon, far below them, the city of Rome glistened damp in the momentary light. Ari could now pick out the ring of St. Peter’s square and then the obelisk jutting up from the piazza of San Giovanni—he would not forget the night before, caught there between two deadly unknowns.

  The roar and pressure of the climb ended, and the cabin fell quiet again.

  Kane turned to Ari: “What about your theory of yesterday? The plot to destroy the Dome of the Rock?”

  Ari was pleased that Kane remembered and mortified that he couldn’t fit last night into his theory. But then he was stunned when Kane retrieved his own argument for him almost word for word:

  “Point one, you said: Shor in Haifa and Chandos in Rome, two thousand kilometers apart, dead the same day, both wearing rings inscribed with a Bible verse about the coming of the Messiah.

  “Your point two: Shor had on him a picture of the Jewish temple with the same verse handwritten on the back.

  “Your point three: Peter Chandos was, according to the DNA people, a descendant of Jewish temple priests.

  “Your point four: Shor and his late niece belonged to a cult of some kin
d, dedicated to rebuilding the temple.

  “Now, from your perspective of yesterday, all of this adds up to a plot—that people are being eliminated to protect this plot, which is to create a New Jerusalem out of the Old. Oh…you also said that the, um, item taken from Technion might play a part.”

  Ari smiled and said nothing; Maryse looked at him with wide eyes.

  “It seems to me,” Kane went on, “that the discovery of this new suspect might lend support to your idea.” The older man looked out his window at the blue haze below and fell quiet.

  Ari waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. After a long silence, Ari realized that he was being challenged. “Well,” he stammered, “if there is an unknown Chandos, he would share Peter’s DNA and would also be a cohen. Thus, he might have an interest in the Temple—in protecting any plans for the Temple.” His mind lit up. “Yes. The DNA sample that was taken—it must have been the unknown twin’s, not Peter’s. He’s been trying to hide his existence from us all along. That’s why it was stolen from the lab.”

  Maryse jumped in. “And if Shor knew him from the Mishmar and trusted him, that explains why Shor broke into the two laboratories—to help the plot along.”

  Kane added, “But Shor didn’t realize that our Unknown was in business for himself.” He paused. “It’s a possibility. A satisfying possibility in some respects. But it’s not sufficient.”

  Ari and Maryse waited for more.

  Kane shrugged into a pillow, closed his eyes, and said. “There’s the small detail of the Pope. What required his death? What does the Temple of Jerusalem have to do with the Vatican in Rome?”

  And, picking up a blanket, he turned away from them to take a nap.

  Kibbutz En Gedi, Israel, 1130h

  A police car outside was the only sign of trouble, Toad thought. The Halevy cottage looked quiet, exactly as he had seen it a few days before. No broken windows, not even a broken vine on the little stone wall around the property.

  “Inspector,” the officer nodded as Toad entered the open door and showed his identification. The man was just closing his tablet and putting his pen away. “Looks to be simple robbery. Three items of clothing taken from that basket there. Seems they were valuable artifacts.”