The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  Sipping at an effete little coffee cup, reading a small leather-bound book, Grammont sat rigidly at the bar and had not moved for an hour. Miner was unclear who the man was or why he was important; but Ari wanted him shadowed, so Miner complied. Bored, he continued with his game.

  The game was called “Inventing Elements.” He had been fascinated by Halevy’s account of the designer-atom device and was having fun feeding new algorithms into his GeM that would produce elements existing only in theory. He had gone far beyond the sea of unstable heavy elements into an archipelago of solid atoms that seemed dull and slow to die. But now he was inventing something entirely strange, something he hadn’t imagined before: single atoms that expire in puffs of air powerful enough to blast away the walls of a building, and iron-like atoms so unstable that they could reproduce out of control and rapidly rip the crust from the Earth and fling it into space. The most hellish atoms had nuclei with 300 or more protons.

  Of course, a nucleus that heavy would disintegrate in milliseconds. But he wondered what a gram or so of the material would take with it at the point of its sudden death.

  He looked up to check on Grammont. The man hadn’t moved, but then he saw approaching him the last person he expected to see.

  “Sarah?”

  All vertical lines, she had become so thin he barely recognized her; she was still wearing a lab coat, and her hair fell straighter than ever. But she smiled as she sat next to him.

  “They told us we could find you here.”

  “Us?”

  An avuncular man in old-fashioned square glasses stood fidgeting nearby.

  “Miner, this is my boss, Dr. Rappaport. You weren’t answering your mobile, so we rang your friend Ari. I hope it’s all right.”

  “Sure.” He was rattled by her presence. “I mean, what can I do for you?”

  Rappaport, looking mildly excited, seated himself in front of Miner.

  “Um, would you mind leaning a bit to the left? I’m trying to keep an eye on something.”

  “Oh, of course. I won’t turn around or anything like that,” Rappaport’s eyes glowed. His New York-accented voice was too loud. “You’re watching someone.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Well, Sarah thought it would be best to speak to you about this. She’s been very helpful the past few days, ever since I got interested in this problem.”

  “What problem?”

  Rappaport went on in his harsh, horizontal American accent. “Your agency asked us to identify the gene sequence of an eyelash. You know about that—you apparently collected it. Yes. And there was low activity in the MAO-A region. You know, almost non-existent!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”

  “Your eyelash is a sociopath!”

  “Oh, yes. The gene problem.”

  Hands in the air, Rappaport was getting more excited. “Then I thought, well, you know—look in the old files! We used random samples of some of those Cohen genes as controls for some of our earliest tests on monoamine oxidase.”

  Sarah continued. “We found something interesting. For several years, the Centre has been doing tests on people with a certain neurological disorder—we call it monoamine oxidase A dysfunction, or MAO-A. People with this genetic makeup are unusually violent; they seem to have no conscience or scruples. Sometimes we compare DNA samples we’ve collected from other sources to MAO-A samples—just to see how normal compares to abnormal.”

  Rappaport jumped in. “And we occasionally run into a control sample that turns out to be not so normal after all. Here.”

  He held up a tablet showing an image of something like snakes in a writhing embrace. “This is your eyelash—and here’s one of our old samples from the Cohanim collection. Notice—virtually identical.”

  Miner pretended to study it. “So you’ve ID’d our eyelash?”

  “No, not at all. But we’ve found his father. He was in our control database all along.”

  “Name?”

  “Number 3111,” Sarah whispered. “Chandos.”

  “The father is as great a hazard as the son—if not more so,” Rappaport put in.

  “Then the father’s is the sample missing from the Cohanim database?”

  Rappaport nodded.

  “I should call Ari Davan with this. Hold on.” Miner smiled at Sarah, who smiled back. He touched his GeMphone and looked up at the same moment.

  Grammont was gone.

  Shin Bet Headquarters, St. Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1950h

  “It’s out of the question,” Kane muttered. “I’m glad I stopped this happening.”

  “Ari’s right. You know he is.” Maryse insisted. She stood and came closer to him. “This may be the only way to draw out the Unknown.”

  “To have you play the stalking horse for an assassin? You still report to me, Mandelyn, and I won’t have it.”

  “Do you have a better plan? The Unknown is not just the key to Acheropita and to clearing Peter Chandos’s name. That’s the least of it. He could be putting the match to the Dome of the Rock as we speak.”

  The blue room was alive with news chatter from the wall screens and from Shin Bet intelligence people swarming around the table. Kristall had called in analysts to examine all the evidence Ari’s team had amassed, but they were at a loss. The Unsub—the Unknown Subject—had evaporated into the heat of the city. A harsh smell of coffee hung over the room.

  In one corner, Toad sat in isolation from the others, staring thoughtfully at the satellite feed and, alternatively, at his own GeMscreen. It was playing a video of a man in a white suit haranguing a crowd of people who at one moment cheered and at another moment seemed to drop into a hypnotic spell. Toad touched his GeM and spoke softly to it: “I need a wiretap authorization.”

  Kane gave Maryse a dry smile. “The Dome couldn’t be safer—it’s under the closest surveillance. And things are moving. We’ve connected the Palestinian Ayoub—who, based on his pinky ring, apparently was a fellow member of your band—to a sinister little crowd here. Group of fanatics called the Flaming Sword. We’re bringing the leader in tonight for questioning.”

  Turning from the fruitless discussion at the table, Tovah Kristall interrupted them. “What have you decided, Kane?” she whispered loudly, her coffee breath souring the air.

  “There’s no question of it. I didn’t bring Mandelyn to Israel to decoy an assassin.”

  “What did you bring her here for, then?” Kristall was contemptuous.

  Maryse burst in. “What about this group—the Flaming Sword, you call them?”

  “The Flaming Sword?” Kristall laughed. “You mean Al-Saif? An old men’s club? What does Interpol have against them?”

  “I was about to tell you,” Kane was back in official mode. “The PA cop killed in Rome, Nasir al-Ayoub, he was connected to this ‘al-Saif’ group through his father.”

  “And to the Cherubim as well,” Kristall said. “That makes sense—keeping the Temple Mount shrines safe is top priority for the PA So to have one of their own in the Cherubim. It follows.”

  Kane went on. “Unless the Cherubim themselves have been infiltrated. You know there are Muslim radicals who’d like to see the shrines destroyed. It’d galvanize the whole Islamic world against Israel. ‘Wipe out the Zionist Entity.’ ”

  “No one knows that better than we do,” Kristall said bitterly. “The Zionist Entity is fully aware of it.”

  “To destroy the Mount, you have to eliminate the guardians or suborn them,” Kane pointed out. “Or, even more effectively, infiltrate them.”

  “Or perhaps all three,” Maryse offered.

  Kane nodded knowingly at her. “Yes. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s best to have more than one point of attack.”

  “So you think the Sword might have something in this?” asked Maryse. “That this Nasir Ayoub, who wa
s a member of both…”

  Kane interrupted her. “Ayoub had the ring. He was one of the guardians, and someone eliminated him. How do we know it wasn’t his own side? No one is rougher on an Arab than another Arab. Or maybe the Sword is also trying to protect the shrines. I want to know one way or the other.”

  Ari Davan came in and joined them.

  “Miner—um, Inspector Kara—has lost Grammont.”

  “Splendid,” Kristall groaned.

  “He was watching him in the bar at the Citadel David. Maybe he just went to his room; Miner’s gone up to check. In any case, Grammont could not have left the hotel—it’s surrounded.”

  Something bright flashed on the news panels, and they all looked up at multiple images of a white-suited man with an elaborate slab of red hair gesturing at them. The sound was muted, but a ribbon of text ran across the screens: TV EVANGELIST BROADCASTS WARNING FROM JERUSALEM: WORLD ENDING TOMORROW.

  “No joke,” Kristall sighed. “At last, a prophet who gets it right.”

  “He’s found him,” Ari cut in, listening to his earpiece. “He got room service to deliver something, and Grammont opened the door.”

  “Superb. Our missing link in this case is having a snack in his hotel room while we wait for the world to end.” Kristall could bear it no longer; she lit a cigarette as the others stared her down uselessly.

  Ari looked grave. “Isn’t it time to give our plan a try? Maryse?”

  “I won’t allow it,” Kane said in a flat voice. “Unsub is a stealth expert—the most precise assassin we’ve encountered—it’s far too dangerous to let Maryse out of here.”

  “He might not even know about me, that I’m connected to the Order of Cherubim,” Maryse observed.

  “In that case, there’s no point. He won’t come after you and it’s a wasted effort. But you’re not taking that chance.”

  “It’s my chance to take.”

  Ari looked at her. Pale and determined, she rose from her chair. He didn’t fully understand, but Maryse was declaring a kind of independence from Kane.

  The Interpol chief gave her a glance, then a resigned smile. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Miner’s back on,” Ari’s head jolted to one side.

  “Put him on the speaker,” Kristall ordered.

  Miner’s voice was a low resonance in the room; the analysts quieted down and stared into the air as if searching for an image. “His GeM’s activated. I’m in the fourth-floor lobby near his room, and I’ve got pairing, so I can see his screen.” There was silence for a moment. “He’s ringing someone. Damn. He’s using the red circuit.”

  With surprising speed, Kane clicked open his own phone and dictated an order to someone on the other end.

  “Tell Kara to link his GeM to mine,” Kane whispered to Ari. “Here’s the network information and password.”

  In a few moments, Kane’s GeMscreen flickered to life, and he projected it onto the wall: there was nothing to see but a menu of apps and a wallpaper image of a French chateau draped in vines. Miner had successfully patched himself into Grammont’s screen.

  “What are you doing?” Kristall’s voice rasped.

  But Kane was listening hard to something on his transparent earpiece. Slowly, a smile cut across his broad face.

  “Tell Mandelyn,” he said simply, and held his GeM up for Maryse to listen to.

  It was a voice she knew well and unhappily. “Good evening, Inspector. The meeting will be held at midnight. In the Dome of the Rock.” Intel clicked off.

  The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 2050h

  “In the name of God, God is the greatest, all praise for God.”

  Amal listened respectfully and hopelessly, holding up his father as they made their slow way around the circular aisle of the Dome. The old man muttered and coughed as if his throat were dry stone, and Amal wiped the running droplets from his face. It was now an hour since dusk, but unaccountably it was getting hotter. All day he had felt as though his heart would burst; now his head pulsed with heat as well.

  His father had insisted on making this journey. As night came on, Hafiz, his face like a gaunt bird’s, announced he would walk to the Damascus Gate; he brushed away the mourners in his house who tried to stop him and took Amal with him. But they had not stopped at the entry to the city; Hafiz whispered to him that he wanted to pray at al-Aqsa. So he had supported the old man through the crowds of white-robed Jews toward the Cotton Merchants Gate of the holy mountain.

  Near the gate, they entered a tiny, deserted shop stacked to the ceiling with dusty toys—boxes of dinosaurs, soldiers, toy guns with orange barrels, and princess dolls, all plastic, all untouched. There was no shopkeeper, no clerk; only four expressionless men on wooden chairs seated like guardians outside the entrance. The men barely acknowledged Hafiz.

  Amal and Hafiz made their way through the maze to the back of the shop, where the old man motioned to the boy to push aside a case displaying hand-knitted baby clothes, yellowed and stiffened with age. Behind the case, he found a utility door double-locked with elaborate, fresh-looking hardware. Hafiz provided a key, and they entered a dark corridor that sloped gradually upward toward a source of light. To Amal’s surprise, they emerged inside a bathroom. It was the lavatory worshipers used for ritual washing before going to the Mosque. They were inside the Noble Sanctuary.

  At a fountain, Amal cupped water in his hands and held it up so his father could wash his face and the blood from his mouth. Together, they had washed their feet and then moved toward the Mosque for the night prayer.

  But they hadn’t gone to the Mosque. They went instead to the Dome of the Rock. In the lamplight the sanctuary shone like a garden of gold and jewels.

  “Surely God will make those who believe and do good deeds enter gardens beneath which rivers flow; they shall be adorned therein with bracelets of gold and pearls.”

  Murmuring verses from the Koran, Hafiz gestured to the lustrous mosaics on the pillars. Amal had never noticed them before: royal jewels hanging like fruit from palms of green stone.

  “As for those who led the way, the first muhajirin…God is pleased with them…He has planted for them gardens streaming with running waters, where they shall have eternal life…This is the height of exaltation.”

  Amal understood that his father was not reciting these verses at random; although he only dimly knew why, he repeated them and tried to remember them. As they slowly proceeded counterclockwise around the aisle, the old man spread his hands to the walls.

  “We caused to grow gardens of palms and vines for you…And a tree that grows out of Mount Sinai that sheds oil.”

  Amal knew that his father had every verse of the holy book in his memory, and wondered if he could ever equal him. And to remember the words was one thing; far beyond that was to understand them.

  “What is the meaning of the tree that sheds oil?”

  Hafiz stopped and smiled weakly at his adopted son. The boy was curious. “It is the oil of anointing. The Prophet, blessings upon him, instructed us to anoint the body with the oil of the blessed tree, for it will heal the seventy nations.”

  “The seventy nations?”

  “Out of Noah came seventy nations to people the earth.”

  “Heal them?”

  “The earth is dark with sin and infidelity, as dark as the Black Stone of Mecca. Here it all began. Here it will end.”

  “We made a covenant with Adam, but he forgot it, and We found him lacking in faith. And when We said to the angels: ‘Bow down before Adam,’ they all bowed themselves down except the Shaitan, who refused.

  “ ‘Adam,’ We said, ‘The Shaitan is an enemy to you…Let him not turn you out of Paradise and plunge you into affliction.

  “But the Shaitan whispered to him, saying: ‘Shall I show you the Tree of Immortal Life and an everlasting kingdom?’ ”

 
; Hafiz motioned upward to the arch above their heads. Flowering over the stone, a tree with sinuous branches tipped with fruit fanned out of a jeweled, heart-shaped vase.

  “The man and his wife ate of its fruit, so that they saw their nakedness and covered themselves with leaves of the Garden. Thus did Adam disobey his Lord and go astray…Whoever you are, death will overtake you, though you are in lofty towers.”

  The Sheikh stopped for breath. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Small bubbles of blood bloomed at the corners of his mouth. After a moment, he opened his eyes again and continued:

  “Then his Lord had mercy on him; He forgave him and rightly guided him. Go hence,’ He said, ‘and may your offspring be enemies to each other.”

  Hafiz lifted his shaking head and looked into his son’s eyes. “That war goes on. I had hoped…but now there is no time. You must lead the battle that is about to come upon us.”

  “I don’t understand, Father.”

  “Do you know what it means…a sufi?”

  “A holy man. You.”

  “A sufi has taken upon himself the suf—the sacred robe, the symbol of his covenant to seek only God. I wear it. And I have also taken the Flaming Sword in my hand. It is said to be the sword of the Prophet, peace be upon him, that carries the trace of the lightning of Heaven. It is now for you.”

  “What is the meaning of the Flaming Sword? And why is it for me?”

  “It has been the burden of our family for many, many years. For centuries. The Sword stands for our willingness to stand against the offspring of the Shaitan, who deceived Adam at the Tree of Immortality. He is our enemy…the Shaitan, the Dajjal…and he is coming here again tonight.”

  Amal was terrified. What could his father mean by this?

  “Where is the Sword then? Why haven’t we brought it with us?”

  Slowly, trembling, Hafiz led him once more around the circle of arches. At length they paused, and the old man pointed to a pillar opposite them. It was like the other columns upholding the Dome, rising from a square pedestal and capped with a gold crown. But the color of the marble was unique: pale, with a bloody fissure like a shaft of lightning from top to bottom.