The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

“And so I conclude my plea with the declaration of the Psalmist: ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity.’ ”

  For a moment Tyrell thought there might be applause as the young man descended the lectern and exited the chapel; those around Estades mutedly congratulated on him on his choice, and the huge room filled with appreciative whispers. The homily had been well received. Yes, Tyrell said to himself, he would approach the papacy in the spirit of seeking unity—but without sacrificing principle. He felt exalted, inspired.

  Then, across the aisle, he caught sight of the superlatively confident Archbishop of Manaus, surrounded by his conclavists, busily writing his own enthronement speech.

  Besharri, Lebanon, 1535h

  The hybrid motor of the little hired car bleated in protest as it reached the thousand-meter mark. It was an old red Mercedes Tourer, and its shifting from electrons to petrol was already uncertain; but Ari willed it with a heavy foot over a hill and stopped in trees at the pedestal of the town. Above, rock houses rose in terraces toward a golden stone church, and Maryse smiled at the beauty of the place.

  She got out of the car and looked upward. The town sat in a bowl beneath the colossal escarpment of Mount Lebanon. She had seen pictures of the year-round snows, but now there was no trace—the heat had scalded everything. Even this wilted grove felt like the kiln room at her old ceramics school. Fortunately, Ari had warned her about the unusual heat, and she wore a light linen top and shorts that made her self-conscious. But she was grateful she had put them on at the airport before making this expedition into this feverish landscape.

  Before flying on to Tel Aviv, Kane had dropped them on the runway in Beirut, where this car had been waiting for them—a rust-red Mercedes hybrid arranged by Interpol. But it wasn’t the most reliable of cars, and she was happy to let Ari drive. Their GeM navigators were useless here. For two hours they had struggled with the old car’s navigation system that knew nothing about these branching, coiling roads, but at last found the town where Peter and Fatima had grown up—and where the transport from the Vatican had terminated two days before.

  A police official in a sweat-tarnished shirt was walking down steps to meet them. A short man with a mustache like a small animal, he gazed at Maryse’s long legs disapprovingly. She wished she had not worn the shorts after all.

  “You are Interpol?” he asked in snipped French.

  “Yes,” she said in the same language, producing her ID and glancing uncomfortably toward Ari. They had discussed it and decided not to reveal Ari’s background unless asked: the reception for an Israeli in Lebanon could be unpredictable. Ignoring the man, he was still putting his backpack together. She glimpsed his requisitioned Tavor as he dropped it into the bag.

  “Yes, my colleague and I are here to trace a shipment that might have contained contraband artworks.”

  “Your office informed us,” the official replied. “We are of course very pleased to help.” He was still examining her bared white legs.

  “Most grateful,” Maryse murmured. “Shall we be on our way?” she called to Ari in English, who came up beside her, grinning.

  At the top of the stairs was a little plaza buried in a clump of blond stone buildings. In a shaded café, three men in sand-colored working clothes drank wine; a thin policeman stood watch on them, but no one else was visible in the sun-darkened square. The official presented them to Maryse.

  “These are the drivers who brought your shipment to the school. At your request I have detained them at their hotel. I have warned them to cooperate completely with you.”

  The policeman nudged the men and they stood, openly staring at her legs as if they had never seen anything so white. Holding her heavy bag in both hands, Maryse moved to conceal herself behind one of the cloth-covered tables; at her side, Ari stifled a cough.

  All three drivers were southern Italians on their way home—but she sensed they were not too angry about the delay. The table was littered with empty wine bottles. She asked a few questions and then projected a photo of Peter Chandos onto the tabletop. One of the men hesitated, tapped at the picture, and nodded. She told the police official to let them go, and he marched the three men growling away. “Wine—finished!” he barked.

  When they were out of sight she turned excitedly to Ari, who had understood nothing. “They unloaded the consignment at the school Thursday night. One of the boxes was different; it was big but narrow. The mayor was there to greet them; the headmistress and the sisters supervised everything, but while everyone was inside the school, this driver went for a cigarette. A man in work clothes approached him and handed him a bill for the narrow box. Then he carried it off to a small van.”

  “That’s when you showed him the picture?”

  “Yes. He said it was coming on night and he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the man in work clothes looked like the man in the picture.”

  “What about the van?”

  “He said it was an old beater, red, rusty, petrol engine. A Jeep. He remembers being surprised that the man didn’t take the box into the school with the other boxes.”

  “The Acheropita.”

  “I think we’re on track. Now we have to find that Jeep.” She pulled her GeM from her bag. “Kane will take care of it. Then we have another stop to make.”

  Ari went into the café for two bottles of water. He had changed into a light shirt, but his climbing boots were heavy—he felt more secure in them. Wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve, he turned to watch Maryse as she talked agitatedly on the phone. She was talking to Kane. There was an odd connection between them—colleagues, yes—but more. A pitch in Kane’s voice, a cadence he had noticed, just a trace.

  But then it wasn’t his affair.

  She was a professional, and that was all that mattered to him. She would be useful up to a point; there would be the awkwardness at the end, and it would mean little and then, in time, nothing. As he watched her leaning tensely into the phone, he took a bottle from his pocket and drank thirstily. The paleness of her arms and legs, the scattering of freckles around her green eyes, the autumn-colored hair—she had been a physical presence only as all women were, and until today, muffled against the cold of Europe. Now she was exposed, vulnerable. He wondered how she would deal with what was coming.

  His own GeM rang. It was Toad.

  “We’ve arrested Nathan Levinsky.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve arrested Levinsky and several men from the Temple society. They were planning to use the, uh, item to remove it. You know. To remove it.”

  Ari made sense of this. So there was a plot, and Toad couldn’t risk even saying the words openly.

  “We’re holding them at St. Helena Street. K’s interrogating them now.”

  “How did you get onto them?”

  “Jules Halevy. Here’s another odd twist,” said Toad. “Somebody stole the high priestly vestments from the Halevys.”

  “What? When?”

  “Probably Thursday night while they were at a kibbutz meeting. Or possibly during the Levine funeral. Anyway, while I was at the kibbutz, Halevy approached me and told me about Levinsky’s plan. He was going to send one of the Mishmar boys into the Dome on Monday.”

  “Yom Kippur,” Ari breathed.

  “I’ll keep you informed. Our trace on that red circuit? The French police say the man you met in Paris has gone missing.”

  “His name was…um, Grammont.”

  “Yeah. They went to his office, to his flat—nothing. He was at the library yesterday, but didn’t show today. Otherwise, co-workers are useless; they say he wasn’t really on staff. Just had a carrel there. No neighbors know anything, they can’t identify any relatives…”

  “What about the other man—Mortimer?”

  “There’s another odd one. There’s huge data on him as you said, far too much. Lots of
traveling, lots of appointments abroad, lots of honors. One thing doesn’t fit—as far as I can tell, he wasn’t in Lebanon when he told you he was.”

  “He was never in Lebanon?”

  “I didn’t say that. He was in Lebanon—in the 1980s with the Foreign Legion. But he had no assignment there in ’06 with the French peacekeepers.”

  “So he couldn’t have run afoul of Hezbollah then.”

  “Not then. He spent ’06 and ’07 in New York with the UN.”

  “What did he do with the UN?”

  “That’s the odd part. He has all these assignments, but you can’t tell what he’s actually doing. No particular job description.”

  “And I used to think he was just a tour guide.”

  Toad was quiet for a moment. “Why would the Unknown climb the colonnade of St. Peter’s in the middle of the papal funeral to take a shot at a tour guide?

  “Yeah. Another good question with no answer. I’d better ring off.”

  Ari looked back at Maryse, who was also putting her phone away. She saw him through the café door, waved, and smiled.

  Air France Flight 1620 over the Mediterranean, 1540h

  Lucien Grammont closed his book for the descent into Tel Aviv. The flight had been pleasant once out of the storms over Europe, the dinner quite good—truffled chicken, excellent haricots verts with béarnaise sauce, and a wine he would remember. He was glad the Order allowed for his one vice, although he was not the gourmand that Mortimer was.

  Grammont brushed himself off, pulled his tie straight, and looked around with distaste at his fellow passengers. Most of them unshaven, they wore sport shirts, sandals, and even short pants; obviously they had heard of the heat wave in the Middle East, but still that was no reason to dress in such a fashion in première classe. He was no lover of the twenty-first century, of electric automobiles, apps for everything, and the abandonment of dignity. Between a fine coffee in the morning and tea in the late afternoon, his days were spent in a courtly world of old manuscripts and books illuminated by hand. To him, the Medieval world was the ideal and the present century a Dark Age.

  His Paris apartment on the sixth étage of a private hotel in the James Joyce Square was sparely ornamented with antique engravings and icons of substantial value to a knowledgeable eye; but his books were his true treasure. Fifty years of collecting had taken the place of wife, children, or friends, and he relished his library with an intensity that most men reserve for money or sex. In fact, in his university days an acquaintance—not a friend—had referred to him as a “bibliosexual.” The few really fine volumes he owned—originals of Rabelais and Montesquieu and one piece of Incunabula—he kept in a bank vault; but the simple white shelves that walled his apartment shone with hundreds of old leather books immaculately catalogued and cared for. He knew each book with the intimacy of a childhood friend and could lay his hand on the one he wanted even in the dark.

  Even now he held his book tight under his arm for the descent. It was a nineteenth-century edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, a favorite he had read many times, taking pleasure each time in the downfall of the proud would-be usurper, Hotspur, at the hands of the dilettante prince. Grammont didn’t like men who wanted to dominate the future. He hadn’t the slightest interest in the future; the fertile past was his terrain, and he interred himself in it completely.

  So it was ironic that he was paid so well to erase it. Although he disliked working with computers, he found it easy and the detection work interesting. He was well paid. The money meant good books and fine restaurants, so he frankly didn’t mind long hours searching databases for anything that might obstruct the Order’s mission or even hint at its existence.

  His predecessors had done their work more concretely—at times they had been required to eliminate certain threats in person. He was prepared to do this; his experience in the Foreign Legion had left him with the necessary skills. But the work had been almost entirely and pleasantly remote, as the Library had the fastest of fiber connections and the fussiest security. Sometimes his work involved an abrupt and anonymous threat of litigation against an academic—he found them easy to intimidate because they ordinarily had little money and feared losing what they had. Usually, however, he did his work without notice. A page disappeared from a book, a Web site lost content, a newspaper archive was erased. Often money was involved, but it was never extravagant; and he had rarely met any of his “subjects.”

  Nor did he have much contact with his principals. They left him to do his work and cared not at all that he spent most of his time on his own collections. The flurry of calls from them the last few days was not unexpected. Only one call startled him: when he was asked if he had removed a certain page from the Great Book at the Via Condotti. He had not.

  In the past year, he had twice feared that he might have to leave his eyrie at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Once in the summer in response to a rocket attack in Jerusalem, and another just this week to intercept two police officers investigating the death of one of his principals. The rocket attack had failed to raise the concerns anticipated; and in the latter case the police had come to him. They had in the end caused little trouble. Now, however, there was an undeniable need for a meeting. Death could not be escaped.

  No one in the Order had required replacement during his tenure, so this meeting would be his first. For years, he had tried to imagine the Order members together and always pictured the rare meeting taking place in a sumptuous mansion with walls of paneled wood and tapestried chairs. However, it was to be held in a hotel conference room like any down-market business meeting; that had been the request, and he had complied with it. The arrangements had been easy, the expense minimal, the locus pedestrian: a tourist hotel on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem. Perhaps it had been chosen because of the short notice; but it was more likely the ceaseless need for anonymity. Also, there was a certain humility in the choice, and humility was not in Grammont’s vocabulary of virtues.

  He had not planned to leave Paris until Sunday, but an insistent call at five o’clock that morning had instructed him otherwise. It was not an unwelcome call; he could postpone one of those intolerable visits to the dentist on the rue Montaigne. He was to go immediately. At the time he had wondered why he had not been contacted through the normal channel; it became clear when he realized the normal channel had been shut down some hours earlier. It worried him a bit; still, the meeting schedule had not changed. No doubt there would be fresh duties on arrival.

  The lights of the airliner dimmed for landing. Grammont could see from his window the sheer line between light and blackness marking the Levantine coast. He had visited the Holy Land many times in connection with his work, but he never landed here without thinking of the ships of his Frankish forebears, Crusaders keen on crushing the infidel, armored men slogging ashore, among them the Chevalier du Grand Mont, his earliest recorded ancestor, who had died on the grim road between Jaffa and golden Jerusalem. Thirty generations had not effaced the memory of the young warrior who left his lady and son in France to expel the heathen from the temple of the Savior and Son of God.

  Discreetly, Grammont crossed himself as the plane descended to the runway and the soil of the Holy Land. The lights came up. Sighing, he opened his book and re-read the first page:

  “Therefore, friends,

  As far as to the sepulchre of Christ,

  Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross

  We are impressed and engaged to fight.”

  Shin Bet Headquarters, St. Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1555h

  “The Arab networks are coming on with an emergency announcement,” her skinny assistant whispered into Tovah Kristall’s ear.

  “All of them?”

  “Yes. All at once. It’s scheduled for four o’clock.”

  “Get these people out of here,” she snapped at the security men and stood. Three frightened-looking boys jumped up and f
ollowed the men out of the room; Nathan Levinsky remained in his chair, trembling, unshaven.

  “So you don’t know anything,” she shot at him. “Too shocked, too old, too grief-stricken. Just don’t start drooling—then I’ll be sure it’s an act.”

  She left Levinsky in Toad’s keeping, but not before calling him to the door.

  “They’ve gone over everything at the kibbutz, correct? No sign of the missing prototype.”

  “Nothing,” Toad responded quietly.

  “Splendid,” she said bitterly. “Now we have two of them out there somewhere. And Miner’s going over everything with Halevy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Briefing in fifteen minutes. I’ve got to find out what the Arabs are up to now.”

  Kristall didn’t wait for the elevator. She lit a cigarette and climbed the stairs, trailing smoke and hacking all the way to the briefing room. Inside were Shin Bet’s security analysts and Didi Mattanyah.

  “Must be an important TV show,” she said as they settled around the table to watch the big screen, where an ordinary-looking news anchor was rattling away low-volume in Arabic. A black, white, and green banner emblazoned with a black eagle rippled behind his head.

  “It’s a war flag,” one of the analysts intoned.

  “I know that,” Kristall snapped back at him. She gestured at her assistant: “Get a linkup with the defense ministry.”

  All at once a babble of voices could be heard over the sound system; it was the noise from the defense ministry scenario room.

  “Pretty loud,” she said. “Whatever this is, it’s going to be nasty.”

  Then everything went quiet as a group of scowling men showed up on the screen. One was a cleric; most of the others were whiskered and wearing open-necked shirts. One looked almost pristine in coat and tie, and he was the speaker. Everyone well knew who he was. Arabic script began to race silently across the bottom of the screen.

  The translator’s voice stuttered to life.

  “We have uncovered a Zionist plot to destroy the holy shrines of Al-Aqsa. This plot is to be carried out on Monday, the Zionists’ holy day.