The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  So, Ari had the pool to himself. He sat on a lounge chair and hugged himself in the soft terry and gazed out at the lake far below. It was hard to tell where the water ended and the mist began; white as the sea, the curtains around the pavilion breathed in the slight morning air. He lay back and closed his eyes, trying not to think of Eleni. Most days she didn’t enter his mind at all, and he felt obscurely guilty about this. He thought about the old priest and the story he told of John Chandos’ bride, the young Jewish woman who wanted only her family and peace; since then, he had not been able to shut away the vision of a windscreen traced with Eleni’s blood. He had repressed it so long; now he wondered how he could live another moment with that image in his mind.

  But he had to. The outlines of the threat to his homeland were at last coming clear to him—and only to him. He knew that. But it was already too much to deal with alone, and there was no telling how much more there was ahead. He needed Toad and Miner and had to get to them.

  It was so fantastic a story even now he wondered if he had dreamed it. It was odd to think that history might not be as anyone had thought. But he still had the little golden ring and knew that Maryse Mandelyn was locked in a room without windows upstairs.

  Still staring at the lake, he went over her story again in his mind, that fantastic story she had told him in that rhythmic Irish voice, in the midpoint of the night.

  “It’s only fair that you know,” she had started, hesitating, staring at the golden ring he held up to her eyes. At that point, something in her seemed to give way. “Although it’s been kept secret for a long time, and at great cost.

  “Tomorrow evening, a meeting will be held that has happened periodically for nearly nine hundred years. Three men will meet in Jerusalem to choose a fourth member of their group. And in this way they’ll perpetuate the most exclusive, the most crucial organization in the world—the Order of Cherubim.”

  “Order of Cherubim? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Few people have. You know what cherubs are?”

  “Little fat angels.”

  Maryse had actually smiled—a tired, rueful smile—and relaxed a bit. “Right. Yes. That’s how you see them in paintings. But originally cherubs were guardian spirits. In the Bible, God ordered cherubim with a flaming sword to stand guard at each of the four corners of the Garden of Eden. The four cherubim were originally fearsome creatures of God, the most powerful of his creatures, whose task was to protect the holiest of places from profane hands.

  “Then,” she went on, “over eight hundred years ago, the West was locked in a fight with the East over who would possess the Holy Land, and especially the holiest place of all… I don’t have to tell you about it. You know better than I do. Shin Bet exists to protect it. It’s the site of Eden. It’s where Abraham went to sacrifice his son. It’s where Solomon built. It’s where Jesus of Nazareth worshiped. It’s the center of the whole world, the most sacred spot on the planet.”

  “The Temple Mount,” he said.

  By then she no longer looked tired. Her eyes were luminous.

  “As I said, all the armies of the West were poured into the fight. The Crusades were the largest military campaign a united Europe ever launched. And the armies of the East were just as strong and just as determined to hold the holy places. Year after year they fought, thousands died, until two leaders who were wiser than the others at last realized what a century of fighting had cost them.

  “The King of England, Richard the Lionheart, and the Sultan Saladin parleyed one night in a destroyed village called Ramla. This was in September 1192. The meeting was so secret that no account of it was ever kept. Richard brought with him his friend, Robert de Sablé, the Grand Master of the Templar order. With Saladin was his most trusted adviser and physician, a Jew—Moshe ben Maimon, the man you know as Maimonides.”

  “The Rambam? He was adviser to the Muslim king?” Ari was incredulous.

  “Look it up.”

  Ari switched on his GeM and called up the online encyclopedia. “You’re right,” he shook his head. “Maimonides was court physician to Saladin. I didn’t know that.”

  “Saladin thought of Maimonides as the wisest man in the world and wanted him at the meeting. It was the strangest meeting in history. Here were the four most powerful men on earth, representatives of the three great religions, parleying in a bloody round tent in the desert, in the middle of the night, with nothing but ruin and death ahead of them. They knew it. They knew it had to stop, but that it would not stop because the stakes were too high. Possession of the Mount of God meant everything.

  “But they also suspected that in truth the Mount belonged only to God, that no mortal king had any right to it, that their battle had been cursed because it was a blasphemy from the start. So they made a pact. It was to be a secret agreement among the four of them, that they would keep the peace on the Mount of God until he came whose right it is to reign.”

  “Until he came…?”

  “Yes. Of course, they each had their own idea of who that Person would be. The Muslims believe that Jesus, whom they call the prophet Isa, will return and take possession of the Mount as his headquarters in the final battle against evil. The Christians believe that when Jesus comes again in glory, he will appear on the Temple Mount and rule the world from that site. And the Jews believe that before the Last Day…well, you know what the Jews believe.”

  “What some Jews believe. That the Moshiach ben David—the Messiah—will come to rebuild the Temple.”

  “Exactly. Only the Messiah has the right to reign. Thus, the motto on the golden ring, which is the sign of the Order of the Cherubim: DVCEI. Donec veniret cuius est judicium. ‘Until he comes whose right it is to reign.’ ”

  Ari was beginning to understand.

  “So that night,” she went on, “the war stopped. They took hands and swore they would protect the Mount, that no one of them would bar the others from the holy place, that they would hold it in trust for the coming of the rightful king. The Crusaders withdrew, Saladin promised free access to all pilgrims, and the Order of Cherubim has enforced the peace ever since.”

  “Enforced it?”

  “Yes. Before leaving the tent that night, the four men swore to each other to perpetuate themselves as the highest and holiest of feudal orders. It’s said that Maimonides suggested it: an order of Cherubim, an order of the powers of the earth who would guard the Mount with a flaming sword if necessary, like the angels of Eden. The Rambam spoke of the guardian spirits of the prophet Ezekiel: the lion, the eagle, the ox, and the winged angel. They saw something providential in this. Richard’s standard was the Lion, Saladin’s the Eagle. Maimonides adopted the Ox and the Templar master the Angel.

  “They also arranged for the perpetuation of the order. Richard swore on behalf of his successors to maintain the pact; for centuries, the kings of England passed the obligation from one to the other. That’s why the lion became the symbol of all England. When Richard the Lionheart died, King John inherited the title of Lion of Jerusalem. John passed the obligation to his son Henry III, and so it continued.

  “Saladin did the same, passing the obligation to his son, and the birthright of the Eagle remained in his family even after his descendants lost the crown. You still see the black eagle on the flags of the Middle East.

  “Robert passed the duties of the Angel to his successor Grand Master, a Frenchman named Gilbert Horal, who championed peace between the Christians and Muslims in Palestine. The Grand Masters kept the pact until the Templars were destroyed in 1314.”

  “What about Maimonides? What about the Ox?” Ari asked.

  “Maimonides’ son Avraham succeeded him, and for generations the descendants of Maimonides were the heads of the Jewish community.”

  Ari was suddenly excited. “The Hebrew for ox is shor. Our murder victim Emmanuel Levinsky changed his name to Shor.”

 
“Right. When he became one of the four Cherubim.”

  “You’re telling me, then, that this Order of Cherubim still exists?”

  “They meet in Jerusalem tomorrow night to replace Shor.”

  “So the King of England is coming to Jerusalem tomorrow.”

  “No, not the King. It’s more complicated. King Edward III’s heir, the Black Prince, died young, and the King had no confidence in his other sons. Instead, he secretly passed the right to the Black Prince’s friend and most trusted knight—a young warrior who had won the greatest battle of the Hundred Years War for him, who had taken the place of his own son in his heart.”

  “And who was that?”

  “His name was Sir John Chandos.”

  King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 0815h

  David Kane looked out the window of his suite at the Dome of the Rock. His lithe young aide brought him coffee and stretched out on the floor with his GeMscreen to watch the news. Kane had just rung off Intel and was now on the phone with the Shin Bet administrator, telling her things she already knew.

  “We’re reasonably sure now that the device did not make its way to the States. Our connections there know that there has been interest, but no delivery. And the Unknown is completely off the grid, I’m sorry to say.”

  He listened to Tovah Kristall’s recriminations in silence. “What good is Interpol…why the foul-ups in Europe…what good is it to put an operative in place only to be surfaced by the Italian police?”

  It was no use to point out again that, unlike her government, Interpol had no satellites—no authority, even, that wasn’t granted by one of the member states.

  “As I understand it,” he interrupted, “Eros-Z has nothing further on the Unknown. We both have operatives looking into that possibility in Lebanon. At this point, though, I’m more worried about the second device…the one Levinsky kept back.”

  Then it was Kristall’s turn to tell him things he already knew—Intel had his sources in Shin Bet. They had Levinsky and his crowd in custody; they were saying nothing. The Technion laboratory was under heavy guard, the En Gedi site had been thoroughly searched, and every GeM in the kibbutz thoroughly scrutinized. As for Davan…he could tell she was worried about him. There had been no report since last evening.

  Kane, too, was worried. He knew that Maryse was with Davan, but had heard nothing from her for more than sixteen hours. Repeated attempts to contact unanswered. He had not anticipated this.

  Kristall rang off. She was competent, he thought, and imaginative. She was one of the few who could see clearly the dangers of the next twenty-four hours. The Israelis were a strange people, living as they did on the edge of apocalypse, crowded together in seacoast cities that could easily be attacked—as indeed the madman Saddam Hussein had done in the Gulf War—and mostly oblivious to the horrific forces that swirled around the Temple Mount. They were not ready for what was to come.

  Intel was keeping him informed. On the west coast, people were jamming the roads to the Negev, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, while others laughed and took their morning coffee in the street bars. A bizarre sort of panic—with half the population fleeing and the other half going to work as usual—there were so many who either didn’t understand or refused to understand the threat. It was just as well, Kane thought. Moving a population as big as Greater London’s all at once…not a very likely enterprise.

  First a dribble, now a flood of refugees was surging into Jerusalem—he could see from his window the rising smog from the west. He shook his head. They weren’t ready for it: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Haifa, destroyed in an instant. But then it was hard to know how to prepare for apocalypse. The Israelis trusted their enemies not to bomb Jerusalem; even those who didn’t believe in its sanctity believed in its security. He also wondered how many of them had come for the spectacle: to see the Dome of the Rock vaporized.

  He had done all that could be done. Before his time, Interpol had been a laughing stock, lumbering around the world after art thieves and forgers; since his time, the agency had taken the lead against terror. He had worked hard to get ahead of these brutes, digitizing millions of fake travel documents, fingerprints, DNA samples. He had made a science of detecting invisible people. Interpol had invented the Red Notice, the virtually instantaneous signal to world police organizations whenever a known terrorist surfaced; the number and speed of Red Notices had curved up exponentially. He himself had helped catch Harun Rashid, the man behind the London bombings, when no other police force in the world could find him. He could rightly boast that the lights of Interpol headquarters had not been switched off since he had taken his job.

  But he had always known the time would come when terror would no longer be contained. It was in the nature of the hearts of those who spread it as much as in their weaponry, which was now more sophisticated and terrible than ever.

  At first, he had hoped to keep Maryse out of it. He had wanted to provide for her, to keep her near and safe, to focus her energy on the organization’s traditional work, to grow her into leadership while he held the world together. That was the reason he had recruited her on the firing range in Glendalough when she was barely beyond freckles and braids. He had learned to plan the important things far in advance.

  Her five-year retreat from the force was nothing—he had not worried about it. The mental rest would give her seasoning. And he knew she would come back when he finally needed her.

  She was needed now, that was certain—and he bit his cheek, wondering where she was.

  There was an abrupt growl of static in his ear and then, once again, Intel’s voice.

  “Considerable row at St. Helena Street. Jules Halevy is shouting about his wife. He’s been trying to contact her, nobody knows where she is.”

  “His wife,” Kane roared. “His wife!” All at once he knew where the second device was. He called to his startled aide. “Elias! Get me on to Shin Bet. And then try again to find Maryse Mandelyn.”

  Mitzpe Ha-Yamim, Israel, 0845h

  Maryse finished writing “Help Me,” grabbed the little piece of stationery and stood at the door listening. What could only be the housekeeper’s cart finally rattled to a stop in the corridor outside, and she shoved the paper under the door, willing it to be seen. After a moment, she heard someone pick up the paper, and then silence. She prayed that her pidgin Hebrew could even be read.

  At last the sound of a keycard, and with a soft buzz the lock opened. Maryse charged at the door, knocking back a stout little woman who fell crashing, dazed, against the corridor wall.

  “Slicha!” Maryse threw back in a whisper and ran. “Sorry!”

  She was sorry, but couldn’t wait to see if the housekeeper was all right. The hall opened into an atrium with a glass-enclosed lift buried in indoor palm trees. Ignoring the lift, she looked around, found the stairway door and yanked at it. One set of stairs, through the lobby, and she would be free.

  Quietly closing the door at the foot of the stairs, she looked around the corner into the lobby and saw the clerk behind the registration desk. A small man in tropical white, he was reading a newspanel on the desk and looked content to stay there. No chance of getting past him. Then the housekeeper’s screams started; she had woken up.

  The clerk jumped at the noise, looked around confused, and walked quickly toward the stairway. Maryse darted back behind the door as he rushed past and up the stairs. The way was clear.

  She didn’t look back, running full speed down the deserted driveway toward the main road. She passed the dirty red Mercedes still parked in a nook of the woods, a long charging cable attached to it; and she knew that Ari had not left her behind. He was still at the spa somewhere and would come after her—she had only minutes to evade him.

  The driveway went down a curve on a steep hill, which made running easier, but the heat was so strong she felt she would pass out before getting to the main road. Her hiking boots, not m
ade for running, felt like heavy weights on her feet, and sweat fogged her eyes. At last the road came into view, and she raced toward a small market and petrol station that stood at the corner. Squatting behind a waste bin, she watched the grove where the driveway from the spa gave out onto the road.

  As she had expected, the red Mercedes reared to a stop at the foot of the drive and Ari leaped out, shirtless, wearing only a dark swimsuit. Maryse fought down an urge to call out to him. He looked around anxiously, gazing at a stream of passing vehicles slowed by a great greenish ambulance that monopolized the road; then got back in the car, swung it in a circle, and drove back up the hill. Maryse relaxed at last, sitting down in oily dirt behind the barrel to get her breath.

  Inside the little grocery, a flat-faced woman in a long, faded shift stood guard on her goods. “Is there a bus?” Maryse asked in hopeful English. The woman shook her head. “All buses gone. Carrying people south.” Maryse looked at pastries in a plexiglass box and juices and tins of food, realizing how hungry she was; but she had no money and knew from the way the woman stared at her that she was out of luck.

  “Do you have a telephone?” she asked.

  “Only my mobile.”

  “I’m sorry…slicha…but I must make an important call.”

  The woman’s face was like stone.

  Maryse knew that she could be trapped at any moment here, so she flew out the door and round the back of the shop, into a shady corner where she could watch for Ari without being seen. She wondered if he had believed her story of the night before. His eyes had softened, she thought, but he had said nothing at all to her after they cleared the border. The Israeli guards had given them little attention—to a man who was obviously Israeli and his girlfriend. The guards were tired. After that, Ari had breathed more slowly but more harshly. When they came to the place, she made out the signboard—Spa Mizpe Yamim—and, after talking to the clerk, Ari had led her in silence to the dark room where he would leave her locked in for the night.