The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  The massive Kane seized her arms, wrenched her around with one hand, and held her tight by the neck under his arm. He was crushing the life from her.

  Ari was frantic. Then he noticed something.

  “Kane!” he cried, pointing skyward. “It’s time!”

  Everyone looked up. Dawn smoldered like faint ash in the windows overhead.

  Kane glanced up, hesitated; Maryse tumbled out of his grasp, scrabbling her way across the Rock toward Ari.

  Indeed it was time.

  Ari jammed his finger into the red-circuit button and shouted into the GeM. “Fosforos! Khamisha asar!”

  A percussive flash.

  Kane’s hand erupted in white fire. Then the linen robe, then his whole body blossomed into liquid flame, and he fell like a meteor against the Rock.

  Astonished, Maryse crouched at the wooden screen and grasped at Ari with her manacled hands. Mortimer yelped with surprise. Hafiz and Amal averted their faces. They all looked away, blinded, as the body of David Kane crumpled to the ground and burned to a bright cinder.

  The Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 0625h

  The rays of the sun ascended over the Mount of Olives.

  “What better way to neutralize the Cherubim than to become one of them?” Jean-Baptiste Mortimer said, released from his manacles and rubbing his wrists. “What do you say, Grammont?”

  The little group, clustered in the shade on the west side of the Dome, watched the medics tending to Ari. They had laid him on a stretcher and were binding his knee with a brace. Another medical man bent over Hafiz al-Ayoub while Amal stood by anxiously. A team of police silently and methodically worked inside the building; leaving them, Miner came out the door and shook his head at Ari in disbelief.

  “And now, Davan, you must explain what happened in there,” Mortimer asked. “I imagine it wasn’t fire from Heaven that just saved us.”

  “I see how it was done,” Miner grinned. “Stunning.”

  Ari winced as the technician locked the brace on his leg. “It was Maryse. She gave me the idea.”

  Everyone glanced at her.

  Unhearing, curled up against the pearly stone of the entrance, Maryse Mandelyn looked diminished, the shadow of a long agony crossing her face. Despite the heat, she held herself tightly, like a vine drawing back from the ice of winter. The men looked at her and felt the distance that men always feel from a suffering woman.

  “ ‘The serpent beguiled me,’ ” Mortimer whispered.

  Seeing her over his shoulder, Ari felt a deep relief that he had saved her, but knew he couldn’t shield her from the past. The weight of it had settled on her. He wondered if she would ever again be able to see beyond the desolation she felt.

  An officer came up with bottles of cold water; the medic tipped some into Ari’s mouth. The water felt sweet and silver in his throat. “Give some to her,” he waved the officer toward Maryse, who took the bottle without looking up.

  “I’ll have one of those.” Mortimer grasped a bottle and emptied it in one long swallow. “So. Now, tell us, Davan.”

  Ari turned his head on his pillow and looked back at Maryse. “Later,” he muttered.

  “I’ll tell you how he did it,” Miner was chuckling. “It was the red circuit, wasn’t it.”

  “Not now, Kara.” Ari’s voice startled Miner, who had never heard his boss call him by his real name. Ari continued, “The director will want a full report. You will want to get it to her as soon as possible.”

  “Sir?” Miner looked puzzled; Ari nodded at him, and then he withdrew back into the shrine.

  A small group of Waqf guards approached, accompanying a woman in sunglasses and a rainbow-colored shawl over a white medical tunic. When she saw Hafiz and Amal, she ran to them and inspected them all over.

  “Hafiz, Hafiz,” she cried repeatedly, and then seemed to scold him—all in Arabic. They exchanged a few words, and the woman stood and advanced toward Ari.

  “Rabia al-Adawi,” she introduced herself, kneeling by his stretcher. Her voice was deep and impressive. “I am the doctor for Hafiz.” Her professional eye looked him over with concern.

  “Thanks,” Ari said, “but I think the medics have things under control.”

  “Sure. I want to thank you for what you’ve done,” she replied quietly, examining the brace on Ari’s knee. “It appears we owe you a great deal.”

  “ ‘We?’ ”

  “We of the Flaming Sword,” she whispered. “For protecting the Noble Sanctuary. And for saving my friends.”

  She stood. “We have been worried for hours.” She spoke in English to Hafiz and Amal. “When you didn’t return in the middle of the night, when we heard nothing, I came to find you. Of course, they wouldn’t let me in.” She tossed her head at the Waqf guards, who shrugged.

  “You needn’t have worried,” Hafiz replied. The bottle of water had revived him. “We only came to worship—sometimes it takes all night.”

  “We met him. The Dajjal who killed Nasir!” Amal whispered loudly to Rabia. “And he fell in a pillar of fire. God struck him down.”

  “Yes,” Hafiz sighed. “The Sword prevailed once again—as it has so many times before.”

  “What Sword? We didn’t have the Sword! We stood like sheep, chained to the wall,” Amal reproached him.

  “It’s time you understood,” Hafiz said, annoyed but still gentle. “The Flaming Sword is in the hand of Allah. We followers of the Sword are not great warriors or mighty men ourselves. We are merely those who have faith in His hand.”

  “So we never fight?”

  “We fight if—and when—the Sword comes into our hands. Tonight He placed it in the hands of another. Our task is to do what can be done; afterward, we are only witnesses.”

  “Witnesses? Of what?”

  Hafiz smiled and sank into the stretcher, gazing up into the center of a bottomless blue sky. “ ‘At all times God walks with the lost-hearted, who see nothing and from a distance cry, O God!’ ”

  Maryse Mandelyn stirred from the portal, stepped to Hafiz’s side, and knelt on one knee next to Rabia. She touched the thin hair on his head; his eyes fluttered and closed. Amal looked up questioningly at Rabia.

  “He looks very ill,” Maryse whispered.

  Rabia’s face told her all.

  The medics put an oxygen mask over his face and carried him away; Amal followed along behind like a small boy.

  Maryse watched them go, her face reddening with tears for the first time. “Will the young man be all right?”

  “He has a long path ahead, and we’ll help him along it. His brother was prepared all his life for it. Now it’s for Amal to choose.”

  Maryse put a hand on Rabia’s and nodded. “You were a friend of Nasir al-Ayoub.”

  Rabia said nothing, but gave Maryse a faded smile and walked after her patient. Then she turned. “We had hoped he would be the last.”

  Once again, Miner appeared at the door of the shrine and asked Ari, somewhat stiffly, “For the record now, Inspector, I need your statement on how you, um, on how the situation was defused.”

  Ari smiled painfully at the police-speak and glanced up at Maryse, who nodded and sat down cross-legged on a tiled stone in the shade.

  Ari spoke into Miner’s recorder. “All right. I knew the nano devices were paired—that if the red circuit was open, they communicated with each other. I’d found out earlier how to activate the device, so I opened the red circuit, which automatically rang up the device in Kane’s hand, and ordered it to…change into something.”

  “Into what?”

  “That was the idea Maryse gave me. She called Kane a devil. And in Greek…”

  Baffled, Miner shook his head.

  “Phosphorus! The Greek word for Lucifer!” Jean-Baptiste Mortimer, who had been listening closely, was exultant. “Brilliant. Positivel
y brilliant! If the ambient temperature is high enough, white phosphorus explodes. And there was just enough of it in his hand to put an end to his scheme.”

  Miner, still playing the professional, spoke up. “Of course. Favorite trick of terrorists, actually; we’ve dealt with white phosphorus before.”

  “So you had to wager that it was hot enough in there to blow up the stuff.” Mortimer smiled proudly at Ari.

  “I didn’t know. I hoped.” Ari tried to remember. “Thirty-four degrees, I think.”

  “Thus the freezing temperature in Nathan Levinsky’s lab. To keep from accidentally blowing up volatile elements like phosphorus,” Miner added. “Now, how does it work?”

  “The code for the device is to speak the name of the element into the receiver, but you also have to add the atomic number. From the periodic table. Phosphorus is number 15.”

  “And the added twist,” Mortimer whispered excitedly, “it understands only Hebrew! Think of it, Maryse. Phosphorus, number 15. The same number as the Devil’s card in the Tarot deck!”

  Maryse trembled, wiped her hand heavily across her forehead to clear away the sweat and to push back at the painful exhaustion she felt. “I keep thinking about the women. About Rafqa Chandos. Fatima, who loved Peter for so long. And this woman we just met.”

  “Don’t exclude yourself, my dear,” Mortimer added. “The Devil has a peculiar agony in mind for certain women…they anger him because they love so much.” He caught sight of a wisp of white smoke emanating from the shrine and murmured. “ ‘Lucifer from Heaven, brighter once among the host of angels than the stars themselves.’ Milton.”

  Miner gestured to the medics, who hoisted Ari’s stretcher and began carrying him toward the waiting ambulance. The others followed.

  “Now for breakfast,” Mortimer intoned, rubbing his hands together. “I’m famished. But perhaps a nap first. What do you say, Grammont? Long night?”

  The Royal Suite, King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 0645h

  Pastor Bob Jonas tipped the hotel barber at the door, then turned and gave the silhouette of the Old City a last look through the paneled windows of the Royal Suite. Pretty view, he thought, picking up a slim black case and shutting the door quietly behind him.

  In the lift, he regarded himself in the arched mirrors—sunglasses, blue golf shirt, khaki shorts, a close haircut that barely showed the dark red cast of his hair. The descent was only six floors, but it seemed much farther. He had only to make it across the lobby; the car he had paid exorbitantly for would be waiting; a half-hour to the airport. Simple.

  A nightmare that seemed eternal had kept him awake all night tossing in his bed. He had rehearsed in half-sleep every moment of the journey to come, and after a few hours gave up on the night and got up to watch for dawn. He was glad when it came at last.

  No one would be raptured into the sky this morning, he thought. No one but himself—by a British Airways flight to London and then to Nassau.

  When dawn had broken in London moments before, the titanic assets of the Global e-Manager Corporation transferred automatically into the electronic coffers of the Left-Behind Foundation. Then, in seconds, through a complex series of transactions, another account in the Bahamas absorbed a payout from the Foundation sufficient to keep a single man in unimaginable luxury the rest of his life. It would take an army of experts months to untangle the mess, and even then, the account in Nassau was untouchable. This is how to make gold from air, he chuckled edgily to himself.

  The lift doors opened on a lobby that was strangely quiet. A barefoot worshiper in white silk sat in one of the sumptuous chairs poring over a book. Two uniformed young men conferred at the concierge’s desk, and the people at reception were buried in their work. Jonas imagined their whispers echoing from the high ceilings were about him, although he knew better. Willing himself invisible, he stepped lightly through the lobby toward the exit.

  The pastor knew his followers would still be out in the plaza after the wakeful night, holding hands, embracing each other watchfully at the Wall, mothers grasping their sleepy children as they stared up at the empty sky. He also knew they would now be turning things over in their minds. Dawn had come. The sun had risen over the Mount of Olives just as it did every day. Just as it had always done. Perhaps, by now, some of them were even beginning to think.

  He quickened his pace. There, outside the exit in the driveway, the metallic-black car was waiting. He had paid far more than the usual fare for a ride to the airport on Yom Kippur, when none but emergency vehicles were supposed to be on the roads. He was relieved to see that the driver had, as arranged, put a counterfeit blue police light on the roof of the car.

  Jonas breathed more easily as the lobby door closed behind him and he reached the car, noting with relief the deep tint on the windows. He slid into the seat behind the driver.

  “Perfect,” he said to the driver, adjusting his safety belt. “I know you’re not supposed to be on the roads today, so there will be a lot more for you if we can stay clear of the police.”

  The driver’s dull face, visible in the rearview mirror, twitched upward to signal that he had understood.

  Jonas sank into the seat, shut his eyes, and smiled at the past he was leaving behind for good. He had grown up in the business, apprenticed to some of the best TV evangelist fundraisers, and had hosted his own Pastor Bob cable show at twenty-two. But no one had done what he had done. Now, he realized, he had the means to make a real difference for the Lord. This would be the end of the fakery. He would disappear, he reminded himself. His monumental fortune would fund real missions in places that really needed them. Africa, he thought. That’s the place. Africans always need help. And he would no longer have to work at it, pretending so hard for so long not to care for the things of this world. Temptation can’t touch the man who already has it all. He would now wrap himself in the luxury he had craved all his life and never have a single worry ever again. Not even about his own salvation. His money would take care of that for him.

  The electric car made no noise at all, and the motion made him sleepy. In the window he watched the yellowing walls of Jerusalem pass by and hoped no one would be out in the streets this early to toss an angry stone at the car. He couldn’t tell where he was, but then the driver was probably following a special route.

  Sleep was gliding over his mind when a fragment of his dream stung at him. He visualized looking down at a crowd of people, mostly women dressed in white, who were staring into the sun, going blind without realizing it. Some people might call him a deceiver, but he didn’t think so. From his point of view, what he had done did not descend to the level of a lie. After all, he keenly believed that the Rapture would come someday; and the logic of October 11, 2027, seemed plausible. Why not today as much as any other day? It may even happen yet—the day’s just starting.

  Then, without warning, the car turned into an underground parking garage and stopped. Jonas woke up.

  “What? Why are we stopping?”

  The driver turned to him and removed his sunglasses. “Mr. Jonas, I’m Sefardi of State Security. This is our headquarters. You will come with me, please.”

  “State Security? The police?”

  Two robust uniforms appeared and motioned Jonas out of the car. They walked him rapidly into a dim chamber and set him in a metal chair.

  “Why am I here? What do you want me for? I…I’m an American citizen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Toad responded in his monotone. “Your consulate has been notified.” He looked the American up and down almost without interest, fingering his GeM in one hand. The two officers did a quick, professional search of Jonas and stepped back.

  A door opened, and more officers came trooping in with someone else in tow, a squat, disheveled man in white clothes. It was Lambert Sable.

  “Pastor Bob? Is that you?” Sable looked baffled.

  “You’ve arrested
Lambert Sable?” Jonas asked, incredulous. “Do you have any idea who this man is?” He raised his voice to Toad.

  “I know who both of you are,” Toad replied without emotion.

  “What do you want with us?” Jonas was defiant. “We’re just tourists. Is this how you treat tourists?”

  “I’m arresting you both for conspiring against the security of the State of Israel.”

  Sable looked desperately at Jonas, who moments before had hoped he would never see the rumpled, sweating former billionaire again. Jonas turned on the ugly little policeman.

  “It’s ludicrous! Conspiring against the security of…how?”

  “By arranging for the theft of some valuable State property—a device for generating designer atoms.”

  “Theft?” Jonas shouted. “Designer atoms? What on earth…?”

  “Before you say anything more, Mr. Jonas, you’ll want to have your consul and a lawyer present.”

  Jonas went silent and dropped back into his chair next to Sable. Toad blinked at the two men, tried to read their character, and then decided there wasn’t much to read after all. The soul of an American, he thought—thin as a plastic credit card.

  Then something spilled out of him, something he didn’t recognize in himself. The image of Catriel Levine hung in his mind. His voice shuddered. “You, and others like you—your religion is a game. A Disneyland fantasy. A circus for children in your own country, but when you play your games with my country…”

  Then he stood and retreated, muttering, to a corner of the room. “People die. Serious people. People with souls.”

  St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, 1415h

  Antonio Bevo sat in the Vatican security center next to the Commendatore of Vatican Police, as they watched together on a dozen flat screens the sodden crowd in St. Peter’s Square. Any moment there would be an announcement. Everyone had seen the white smoke from the Sistine Chapel and knew that a Pope had been chosen; soon the new Holy Father would appear on the Cathedral balcony to be acclaimed.

  The two officials kept their eyes on the viewscreens.