Читать книгу The Flaming Sword - Breck England - Страница 8

Chapter 1

Thursday, October 7, 2027

Hotel St. Regis, Rome, 0515h

Just before waking, she dreamed of the face of Christ withdrawing slowly into the silver petals of a cloud, then of a city of domes and towers vaporized in a flood of brimstone, grainy and white rising against the sky.

The city is a cauldron. It shall be laid waste, the altars made desolate.

By a dim nightlight, Maryse Mandelyn stared at the flowered plaster of the ceiling overhead and recognized it as late nineteenth century. She smiled at David Kane’s influence, how he was able to find her not just a hotel room in the rapidly filling city, but one of the best.

She had hoped to astound her old mentor—and current Interpol boss—with the story of the inscription on the rings, but he had only said he was “satisfied she was making progress.” It hurt just a little; but then again he was right. Simply uncovering the meaning of the inscription had brought her no closer to the Acheropita. She could still make nothing of the disappearance of the priceless icon of Christ, stolen in plain view of a crowd of people and a battery of television cameras.

In reality, the problem had only deepened.

The city is a cauldron. A passage from the book of Ezekiel. It shall be laid waste.

Certainly, Rome was a cauldron. With the violent death of the most controversial Pope in a millennium, the city boiled over. Massive street fights raged within sight of the Vatican. Right-wingers attacked crowds of gays, female priests, and other partisans of the late Pope and his revolutionary Vatican III, who rallied and hit back hard.

It had been five hundred years since Luther and the schism that tore the Catholic Church in two, the news panels were saying. Five hundred years before that, the Great Schism had divided the Western from the Eastern Church. Would the cycle repeat itself? With half the Church accusing the other of sodomy and apostasy? Could the Church even survive this time?

Flying back to Rome, Maryse had watched the news for the first time in days. She had not realized the extent of the struggle that was now gathering force. The Ecumenical Council was calling itself back into session without waiting for a new Pope. There was video of the bull-like Irish Cardinal Tyrell denouncing Vatican III. Some cardinals were calling for a conclave to select a Pope to begin immediately after the funeral; others were refusing to participate until a decent period of mourning for Zacharias had passed. There was open talk of two conclaves.

She had looked around to find the airliner filled with clergy, mostly French, some of them women wearing the collar, talking agitatedly among themselves. They were all making their way toward the eruption.

She had closed her eyes at this and thought of the Carmelites in their little retreat near Paris. She knew none of this would touch them. Even if the Church were torn in two, they would continue their prayers as they had for centuries inside those walls that were like rock in a stormy sea. Fitfully, she tried to retreat mentally and sleep, but could not.

Ari Davan had left her at Chartres. She had caught the strange look on his face as he examined the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of the Cathedral. He said he needed to return immediately to his headquarters at Jerusalem. He would not stay for Jean-Baptiste’s elaborate lunch. She watched him walk briskly down the hill toward the station.

This is what men do, she had said to herself. When they leave, they leave abruptly.

Jean-Baptiste had been quiet at lunch. He had given Maryse what she needed and then withdrawn into fragmentary remarks about the food. When they returned to his house, he had sat down at his desk and written a few sentences on a paper which he then sealed up with red wax. It was the seal of the order of Malta.

“How unfold the secrets of another world perhaps not lawful to reveal. We think you are ready—both Milton and myself.” His wide smile had thinned as he gave her the envelope. But the answers she had found at Chartres led only to more questions.

West Jerusalem, 0630h

As a boy, Shin Bet Inspector Ari Davan had barely endured the long hours of shul, the intense study of Torah and Talmud he had to undergo to become, as his father put it, a man. At that age he had been more interested in the black eyes of a neighborhood girl staring down from the women’s gallery than in the black-on-white words he was required to decipher and recite endlessly.

Right now, though, those words mattered very much.

It had come together for him on the porch at the Cathedral of Chartres as he had looked up at the statue of the man the Christians called Saint Peter—the first Pope. What struck Ari was the figure’s dress. It reminded him of an engraving in an old illustrated book in his father’s library. He had to see it again.

Before sunrise, he had arrived at his parents’ house, touched the mezuzah at the door, and found his father awake in the small study of the West Jerusalem house. The room had not changed; he was familiar even with the dust. Among the grainy pictures of forgotten relatives that crowded the walls was a heroic photo of Moshe Dayan looking like a benevolent pirate in his black eye patch, and next to it a large portrait of a bearded Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel. His father had served under Dayan as a very young soldier. The silver menorah, the only thing his family had kept from before their first days in the land, shone yellow in the low lamplight.

His father found the book for him, a crumbling antique, and he knew exactly where the picture was. The illustration was still as brightly colored as the day it was printed. He had already, on his flight home, called up a hundred images like it on his GeM, but this page was worth more than all of them.

The caption read Aharon ha-Cohen: Aaron, the high priest of Israel, vested in the linen robes of the priesthood with the breastplate of twelve shimmering jewels, each of them representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel.

As he had done as a boy, he took a pen from his pocket and traced the words on the page with it:

And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron…a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and an embroidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle…and thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cunning work…and thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stones: and the stones shall be with the names of the children of Israel…every one with his name shall they be according to the twelve tribes.

As he read, childhood returned. Then, as now, his father would wind phylacteries around arm and forehead and mourn aloud, this man who even then had always seemed to him as old as Sinai itself, over the destruction of the Temple; and when as a little boy he had learned to cry over a loss he did not understand and lament an uncleanness that could not be washed away, he had barely comprehended the grief of the Jews, the peculiar suffering they could not escape. And he also came to resent it all.

He had often idly wondered why he had become a Shin Bet man. Now it came clear for him. It was a way of purging the helplessness of his father and the impotent shadows of the generations before him, a people marched off again and again like animals to the slaughter. He had tried to break away while holding on at the same time. No high priest could exorcise the history that was in his blood.

Reb Davan was startled to see his son at that hour, and he was even more surprised at the questions Ari asked—warily, just as he had done years before. Ari knew better than anyone about his father’s wish for a scholar son who would one day read aloud in the synagogue; there was all at once a sad new eagerness in the pious eyes. Wandering frantically through his books, he nearly burst with erudition on the subject.

But it was all plain enough.

Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place…he shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments…

And he shall take of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering…Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, and bring his blood within the veil, and he shall sprinkle of the blood upon the altar eastward with his finger seven times.

Blood sprinkled on the altar again and again, in waves. Within the veil of the Holy of Holies. In the Sancta Sanctorum.

In the whole world there is no holier place.

His father had nearly wept as he described the great Day of Atonement. “The Sabbath of Sabbaths,” he had called it. As a boy, Ari remembered, he had sweated through the long warm holy day without a bath, without a morsel of food or a sip of water, listening to the keening prayers of his father and the others in the massive cubical shadows inside the synagogue. He was not permitted to put on his shoes. One Yom Kippur afternoon he had stared endlessly at a television screen that showed only a still picture of flowers and a flaming candle; and at the breath of evening he had shot out of the house up a sand hill to get fresh air into his lungs.

Now, however, his father’s every word was important. “Yom Kippur is the day of cleansing, when all Israel makes atonement for sin, when we fast and mortify ourselves before Ha-Shem because of our impurity.”

“And the blood, the altar, the priest?”

“That was in the days of the Temple,” his father explained. “Two goats were selected to bear the sin of the people. One goat was l’Adonai, for the Lord, and the other l’Azazel—for the Devil. The blood of the Lord’s goat, slaughtered by the priest, was taken solemnly into the temple and sprinkled upon the ark within the veil. Only the high priest was permitted in the Holy of Holies. Then he laid hands on the other goat—the scapegoat—to transfer upon its head the sin of Israel. A red cord was tied around the goat’s head and it was led away to a place of shame in the desert, the place Duda’el, where it was thrown from a cliff.”

“We don’t do these things now.”

“Ah, no,” the old man nodded. “Without the Temple, there is no altar, no sacrifice. So, as Rambam taught, until the Temple is rebuilt, the atonement must be made on the altar of every Jewish heart. It is why, on the Day of Atonement, we sing kol nidre in the synagogue.” Ari was well acquainted with the ancient song that implored God to forgive unfulfilled vows.

“Will the Temple ever be rebuilt?”

Even in the dim light of the study, Ari could see his father’s eyes darken. “Not by human means. We cannot rebuild it. It is death for any Jew to set foot on the Temple Mount.”

“Why?”

“Because, as Torah says, only a high priest of Israel may stand in the qodesh qodeshim—the Holy of Holies. Any Jew impertinent enough to walk there is guilty of the grossest sacrilege.”

“But one day…?”

“One day, son. One day. Ha-Shem Himself will redeem the Temple Mount. As Malachi the prophet wrote, the priests shall be purified and offer sacrifice once again in righteousness. But beforehand will come a time of trouble, the chevlay sh’l Moshiach, the birth pains of the Messiah. The ten days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement.

“Then the Messiah will bring in Ba ha-Olam—the world to come—and the righteous will sit down together to study Torah forever.”

Ari’s father looked thoughtful for a long while and then, abruptly, blinked at the study window. “It’s dawn.” Almost automatically, he bent to the bureau and removed from a drawer his box of phylacteries and the velvet pillow that held his skullcap and tallit, the worn prayer shawl he had used since boyhood. He stood, hesitated, and offered them to Ari. A silent invitation. After a moment, Ari took them from his father and followed his lead as the older man put on another tallit and phylacteries.

Through the window, the first sun glimmered from the eastern hills.

Lion Gate Street, Old City, Jerusalem, 0945h

The shopkeeper could not take his eyes off Nasir’s gun. The shopkeeper’s wet, warm smell filled the shop as the sun struck at the corrugated tin awning. Nasir had followed him into the shop before giving him a chance to open the shutter door; he felt sweat irrigating his own back, but he wanted the man to stew a little longer.

“What did you tell the Israeli police?” he asked finally.

“When?”

“Please.”

The shopkeeper suffered in the heat. “Let me turn on the fan. It’s so hot.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“I told them nothing.”

“What did you tell the police?”

Nasir’s voice did not change. He simply smiled insistently. The shopkeeper glanced from the gun in Nasir’s hand to the fan on the ceiling and wiped his face repeatedly with his forearm. At last his eyes blinked hard as if he were about to faint.

“What did you tell them?” Nasir repeated.

“I told them only what I knew. Only that I knew Talal Bukmun. That he was my mother’s lodger.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. They already knew…”

“They already knew what?”

“That he was a weapons dealer. I told them nothing they did not already know.”

“What did they say to you?”

“What did they say to me?”

“It’s going to be very hot in here after I leave and lock the shutter behind me. From the outside.”

The shopkeeper, not a quick man, considered this and replied. “They told me to say nothing to anyone.”

“About what?”

“They said they would shut down my shop, intern me.”

“They told you to say nothing to anyone about what?”

“Please. They are watching me. Perhaps listening…”

“I am watching you, too. And listening.”

“I would not betray Talal.”

“You would betray your mother for a shekel. What did they want to know?”

“They asked me if I knew a man named Ayoub.”

“Who?”

“Nasir, I think it was. Nasir al-Ayoub.”

“Do you know such a man?”

“No. I don’t know him.”

“Why did they ask you about Nasir al-Ayoub?”

“They say he killed Talal.”

“You know that I am Nasir al-Ayoub.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me. They showed you my picture.”

The shopkeeper blinked at the sweat in his eyes, as if willing himself not to see.

Nasir smiled grimly at him. “I think you killed Talal. I think you stuffed him in that hole.”

“No, no. I had no reason.”

“You owed him money.”

“No!”

“He wanted you to pay him. You thought no one would miss him, so you killed him.”

“No!” The shopkeeper stared miserably at the gun as Nasir held it a little higher. “You are his friend? I was his friend, too. I gave him a place to live. A place to hide.”

“He gave you money.”

“He gave me some money, yes.”

“So you killed him rather than paying him back. You lured him here and left him dead inside that hole where he would never be found.”

“No! He came here by himself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“You know. He wanted to use your shop. You told him about the tunnels. Why did he come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know. He came to meet someone. Who?”

“I don’t know who.”

“What did he tell you? He didn’t crawl through that filth for nothing. He wanted to get into your shop. Why?” For the first time Nasir raised his voice.

The shopkeeper trembled as if with cold. He wiped his face again and again; the hair on his forearm was like mud.

“All right. He was angry. He said someone had betrayed him, and he was going to make him pay.”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Please. The man who betrayed him. Who was he? Did Talal say it was me?”

“No! I don’t know. I don’t know.” The shopkeeper moaned over and over.

Nasir was satisfied. He knew it wasn’t likely that Bukmun would have confided much to this sopping jelly of a man.

But then the jelly surprised him.

“I think it must have been the man who bought the rockets from him. But I don’t know who he was,” the shopkeeper whispered. “It was the man in Rome, he said. The man in Rome.”

“What man in Rome?”

“A man he saw on the television.”

Seconds later, the shutter was open to the cooler air from outside and Nasir was gone.

***

Down the street, in the white van, Toad watched Nasir walk briskly from the shop. “He’s had quite a discussion with the shopkeeper,” Toad reported from the driver’s seat.

“What’s the story?”

Toad was relieved to hear Ari’s voice from the other end. “You’re back?”

“Came in last night. I’ll put you in the picture when you come in. What’s the story?”

“He was drilling the shopkeeper to find out how much he knew, how much he might have told us.”

“And?”

“He talked. He told Ayoub that we had his picture. Said Bukmun was in a stew over a ‘man in Rome’ who betrayed him, a man he saw on television.”

“So Ayoub and the shopkeeper don’t know each other?”

“Apparently not—only from the photo. At least that’s what we’re meant to believe.”

Ari chuckled. “Not everything people do is a ruse.”

“It’s possible that Ayoub didn’t know we were listening…or didn’t care,” Toad replied dryly. “It’s also possible Ayoub did not kill Bukmun and is really trying to find out who did. But start multiplying possibilities and the product is less and less certainty.”

Back in the headquarters building, Ari smiled at this; he knew that Toad thrived on low levels of certainty. He was the only man Ari knew who could keep a thousand possibilities in his mind at once without paralyzing himself. Most of his colleagues were too quick with theories—Toad, on the other hand, very slow coming up with a certainty. With Toad, it was partly that he had been trained in the severest tradition of the yeshiva, and partly that he believed in nothing.

“So if Ayoub did kill Bukmun, he was just trying to find out how much the shopkeeper knew. But what’s the connection with a ‘man in Rome’?”

Toad thought for a moment. “Pictures of Ayoub’s meeting in Rome have been on TV for days. Bukmun may have caught sight of Ayoub and realized he was the man who bought the Hawkeyes. The man who betrayed him.”

“Betrayed him?”

“I haven’t worked that out. It’s new. Shop Man was a little more open with Ayoub than he was with us.”

“Could Ayoub have entered the shop Tuesday night through the tunnels and got out fast enough to show up at the front door?”

“Yesterday we found a tunnel grate in the next street that showed evidence of recent entry. A person could crawl through that tunnel from the shop, get out into the street, and walk around the corner to the front door of the shop in about five minutes.”

“Where’s Ayoub now?”

Toad checked with the agent following Ayoub. “He just walked through the Damascus Gate. Looks like he’s making for home.”

Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 1000h

“After today,” Hafiz al-Ayoub thought, as he lay on his couch and rubbed the ring with his thumb. Its worn gold felt like part of his body. “There will be no more heat, no more blood. Only a green and quiet peace.”

For a second day, the old sheikh had eaten no breakfast. He felt he would never eat again. He wished only to lie quietly and enjoy for as long as possible the diminishing breeze that came through the window of his room. From the table by his couch, he picked up his book of Shirazi’s poems. Hafiz did not believe in the legend that this book could be used for divination, but he enjoyed the game; he would ask himself a question and then open the book to find the answer. These days his question was always the same.

He opened the book at random and read:

Dim, drunk, I crawled the years along

Until, wiser, I locked away my passion;

Then I rose a Phoenix from my dust;

I closed my story with the bird of Suleiman.

Satisfied as always, he closed the book again and contemplated the verses he had read. Outside his window the morning birds had gone quiet from the heat; they would not be heard again until sunset. Tonight, the sword would pass into his son’s hand and then he could rest.

For forty years he had guarded the sword with its streak of fire, although he had seldom taken it from the hiding place and the tapestry sheath. He had carried it in his heart along with Jamila—perhaps that was why he had lost her—and he had carried it through the long legal wars in courts from The Hague to Jerusalem. For a long time he had carried it in trust for Nasir and perhaps for his son after him, although he now had no hope of seeing Nasir’s children. People who thought the sanctuaries were safe for all time were as deluded as those who expected that the Israelis at any moment would take it in their heads to do the worst they were capable of. He had walked the careful path of Suleiman, refusing to acquiesce to the inner rage, staying watchful in the courts—at times even revealing a glimpse of the blade—until the day when the Rightful One would claim his own.

His duty was ended now. After tonight, he could sleep.

Nasir came into the room. “I got Amal to school.”

Hafiz stirred, pulling himself up on his couch. “You should have a word with the teacher in the madrassah,” he said wearily. “Amal is likely to hit him one day.”

Nasir gave a loud chuckle. He wanted to keep things light while he scanned the news on TV. With the sound on mute, the screen would not bother Hafiz, who was becoming noticeably less wakeful the last few mornings.

“Why are you watching television in the middle of the day?” his father asked from the couch.

“I want to see the news.”

Hafiz settled back motionless again. Using his GeM to control the flatscreen, Nasir scrolled quickly through frozen images from a dozen news broadcasts of the last few days. Like train windows, the images flashed past of the dead Pope sprawled on a staircase, of suitably solemn world leaders, of authorities both PA and Israeli deploring what had happened; and then of lesser figures and lesser stories.

There it was. He had paid little attention to it. The others at the station had made fun of him. Tuesday, 1000 hours—the item’s first appearance. He scrolled through several more appearances during the day and stopped to study one of them.

When Hafiz awoke again, Nasir was gone. It was not right to say he had been sleeping—only dozing. He had been thinking of Nasir’s mother, of Jamila; he had locked her away in his heart so long before. His uncle had questioned the wisdom of the marriage, of the passion Hafiz felt for Jamila, in light of the work Hafiz was to do. But his uncle needn’t have worried, because Hafiz did his work strictly and seriously. When a child was not forthcoming, he had adopted one, reared him, and trained him. He had now added forty years to the eight centuries of peace on the holy mount: no new Crusade had been allowed to form, even in the worst of times, even amid worldwide jihad.

He had managed the repercussions of the attack on al-Aqsa, which had nearly brought him to the grave. In truth, Hafiz smiled to himself, it had brought him to the grave. Drunken with rage, the others were demanding the worst. The practice of diplomatic delicacy had exhausted him to the point where the carrion birds in his blood freed themselves and now preyed steadily on him.

It was martyrdom of a sort, he smiled to himself.

One day his uncle Haytham had made the ultimate sacrifice, which he had expected to do. Consumed by two wars, worn out by the insistent pull of martyrdom, he died in the first Intifada. After the one-eyed Zionist general in 1967, Munich in 1972, the disastrous Egyptian attack in 1973—but the Intifada was a new thing. Haytham was exhausted by the frenzy, the stones in the air, the decapitations, and the red craters in the mud. One day he had collapsed in the street and died under the wheels of an IDF van—an accident, they said.

That was the beginning of the forty years. From that day, he had carried the weight of the gold ring on his hand.

The world continued, a cancer in remission one day and fulminating the next. A Jewish dentist murdered worshipers in the mosque at Hebron. Palestinian children blew themselves up in the markets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Rabin was assassinated. Rockets flew over Gaza and Israel. Between outbreaks, Hafiz struggled to keep a lock on his anger. It was beyond comprehension. The Americans lavished money on the Zionists, moved their embassy to Jerusalem, and refused to open their eyes. The Zionists talked themselves deaf about their liberty and their security. It was as the Prophet had said—God might as well have given the precious treasures of the Torah and the Gospel to an ass. In time, there was the excursion to Norway—on a private airplane—and at last Jamila awaiting him as he floated to the ground at Amman. It was compensation enough.

Jamila’s father kept a peacock in his garden in East Jerusalem, and Hafiz had heard the peacock’s cry many mornings from his house. The families had long known each other; it was only natural for Jamila’s father to agree to the marriage, even though Hafiz’s father had lost his property. Among the leading families there was an understanding about Hafiz, and the family of Jamila welcomed him. Although she had traveled widely, had attended university in New York City, the instinct for home was strong in her. The peacock, the bird of Suleiman, had brought them back together, he joked.

He took walks with Jamila in the evenings among the sedative trees of the Mount of Olives, and she came to understand hazily why he wore the ring and why he kept his eye on the Qubbet. Above them, the Dome receded into the sunset; at these times, the oath he had sworn melted from his memory with the last rays of day. Then, on a blue afternoon in the fall, when he was walking there with Jamila, an explosion slashed the air from the direction of the city. The Israelis had decided to open an ancient tunnel along the base of the Temple Mount, and there was rioting in the Muslim quarter. Many bombs followed that one; for months, he worked harder than ever before, but then the Second Intifada began, and with it his wife’s long decline and the painfully sweet adoption of Nasir. She could not have children, but she had desperately wanted Nasir—if only to fill the emptiness that was coming for Hafiz.

For forty years, he had worn the ring while the darkness gathered and deepened around him. King Suleiman had used his ring to summon the jinn, enslaving them to build his great mosque. The cry of the bird of Suleiman would announce the Last Day, it was said. It was time now, thought Hafiz. It was past time. Martyrs prepare themselves for forty days; surely forty years was more than enough.

Hafiz had put on his uncle’s ring just before he buried him and had never taken it off. But he had wanted Nasir to have a new ring. There was too much blood on the old one. He had told Nasir to bury him with the old ring and thus bury the old blood. Hafiz had hoped to wear it until the Day—now that hope was in his son.

Simon Winter Centre for Genetic Research, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1015h

Joseph Rappaport closed his eyes for a few moments. At last the chaos caused by Emanuel Shor’s death was settling—files closed, police gone, himself appointed temporary Director. He had spent the morning putting his electronic signature on documents, including dozens of applications for information from the Cohanim database, all from America. As soon as possible, he would shunt this duty off on the assistant directors. The whole thing bored him.

Rappaport had never understood Manny Shor’s obsession with the old Cohanim database. It had been well picked over for years by snobs, genealogists, and medical people researching obscure diseases.

To Rappaport, the monoamine oxidase project was so much more compelling. To experiment with the genes that made people violent, that moved them to hatred—monoamine research promised to get at the root of this ancient curse. Some of Rappaport’s distant cousins from Venice had been transported and exterminated in the closing days of the Holocaust. Even growing up near New York, he himself had felt from some people an occasional coolness, the barest hint of disapproval of his face, of his name. Then, late one day in the time of Trump, he had gone from the lab to his tiny office in the Life Sciences building to find a drawing of a swastika hanging on the door. At first he felt afraid—he had looked around in terror at the darkening corridors—but then curiously fascinated. From that hour he was determined to find out what might be locked in the human codes that controlled the temperature of the heart—from cold looks to flaming fanaticism.

But Manny had shown little interest in the monoamine project that now funded most of the laboratory’s work. The Cohanim thing brought in a big donation now and then from an American Jew who wanted to know if his ancestors were priests. Rappaport wondered why Americans, so proud of their independence and individualism, still needed to make these links. Leaving America for Israel had caused him no concern at all—it didn’t matter to him where he lived, so long as the project he worked on was interesting. He felt no more connected to Haifa, Israel, than he did to his old neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This linkage others felt to a land or to a people or to a story—or to a God—was a mystery to him. He looked around his desk at the photos of Ernst Schrödinger, of Watson and Crick, of Stanley Cohen—these were his heroes, the people who explained life instead of romanticizing it. As a boy, he had read Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? and knew that he would spend his life answering that question.

He had once asked Manny how he envisioned the world to come, and Manny had told him that, for a Jew, Heaven would be to sit peacefully in a garden with a minyan of brothers who love one another, learning and discussing Torah for eternity. Although the agnostic Rappaport had smiled at this, the vision suggested something to him. He would not admit it to anyone, but it moved him in the same way as the still meadows and waters of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which was the only part of the Bible he remembered.

Although Rappaport did not believe in the world to come, he began to envision a world here and now where people would no long fear each other, but would sit down in peace and put their minds to work instead of their hatreds. To gain dominion over those old foes—prejudice and violence—surely that was worth his life’s work. Rappaport was not one of those geneticists who looked for more and more specialized diseases to conquer; he was interested in the universal disease of hate.

Thus, the monoamine project. As a young scientist, he had read about a dozen men from the same Dutch family sent to prison because they were uncontrollably violent. One was a notorious street bully, and another had raped and knifed his own sister. All the men had a mutation on MAO-A1, a monoamine oxidase gene. He began to wonder: could violence and hate be genetically conditioned? Could a few manipulations of the human genome put an end to prejudice, terror, crime—perhaps even war? Could the very nature of humanity be changed?

His goal was never articulated that way, but Rappaport spent the next twenty years working on it. The best work was being done at Technion; thus, he had come to Technion. He had reduced herds of animals to docility, tracked and manipulated the DNA of hundreds of criminals, and was reasonably sure that he knew how to proceed. As usual, however, the ethicists got in the way of the kind of experiments he wanted to do. He was more bemused than disappointed; after all, even the great James Watson had at one time called for a moratorium on DNA research out of fear that plagues might be accidentally unleashed. Still, he found it ironic that the Ethics Committee should stand in the way of making people more peaceful.

Manny had laughed at his ideas. “Peace is not just the lack of violence,” he had said. Rappaport had not known how to respond to this; to him, the elimination of violence seemed contribution enough. The director’s lack of interest in the monoamine project had hampered progress, but now Rappaport saw his way clear. A tragic death—in Rappaport’s world, Manny would not have died this way—but the past was Manny’s business, the future Rappaport’s.

There would be no more excursions to Jerusalem to wait alongside Manny Shor while he stared at King David’s Tomb. Many times the old man had coaxed him into coming up to the city with him, primarily because Manny was not a confident driver. He would chatter about Moshiach ben David and the world to come, about the royal priesthood and lineage, about the ludicrous prospect of digging for King David’s DNA. Long meetings with puzzled officials always ended with a pilgrimage to the Tomb, a marble monolith jammed into a little building on the south end of the city. It did no good to tell him again that it was not the Tomb of King David, that it was a Christian monument dating to the Crusades. He knew that as well as anyone; he went over and over the dilettantish archeological diagrams that pretended to show the location of the real tomb, needling the historic-preservation people about this or that possibility, checking to see who was digging where.

Rappaport always held back at these meetings, pretending as hard as he could to be the chauffeur, staring deliberately at his fingers. The officials he met, wary but respectful of Manny’s reputation, bit their lips and tried to listen. “The Messiah of David will carry the DNA of David,” Manny would explain. “We need those bones. Nothing is more important than isolating this strain. If the genome were available, the Messiah’s lineage would be immediately recognizable. Don’t you understand the urgency…the importance…?” And then he would trail off in realization that the officials he spoke to wanted nothing more than to see the back of him. His campaign to get the Israeli government to crack open the marble sarcophagus in the Crusader church—in the desperate hope that everyone might be wrong—went nowhere. Still, he would beg Rappaport to take him there.

The old man always stood covered before the Tomb and always prayed the same prayer, over and over—“May he come into his kingship in my lifetime and in my days and in the lifetime of the whole family of Israel swiftly and soon.”

The drives back to Haifa were long and dispiriting. Uncharacteristically quiet, Manny would sit behind him poring over worn-out maps of Mount Zion or reading some new article that promised a breakthrough. But the remains of King David remained undisturbed—wherever they were.

In the final few months, Rappaport had noticed a new energy in his colleague. Even though he rarely came to the lab, Manny was excited about the prospect of triangulating on the Aharonic genome—the genetic profile of the first great high priest of Israel, Aaron, brother of Moses. Of course, without a bone or two, there could never be certainty. But mathematical possibilities became probabilities as Manny studied and compared the profiles of thousands of Cohanic descendants. Rappaport cooperated politely, waiting for the opportunity that would inevitably come.

And now the old fool was gone and he was at last Director of the Centre—even if temporarily. It would soon be permanent, he was sure. He stood up and looked around at the lab through his glass office walls; with the past taken care of, he would spend the afternoon planning the future. He hoped that, if Heaven existed, Manny had found his discussion group.

A lanky young woman, one of the lab technicians, was crossing toward his office with an electronic notepad in hand. She was an intriguing case—a carrier of Tay-Sachs, she had joined the lab hoping to work on a therapy for it and turned out to be quite competent. He had come to rely on her, and in fact had just given her a highly confidential assignment.

“What do you have for me, Sarah?”

“We finished running the profiles the police wanted. Here are the results.”

Rappaport glanced at the data. “What’s the story?”

“We compared the sample we got from Rome with the Cohanic profile. It’s a very pure strain—95 percent match.”

“Hm. But nothing on sample 3111.”

“Sorry. As you know, we don’t keep printouts of the Cohanics—that one’s gone. Unless it’s in one of the old control studies. Still, there’s something else I thought you’d find interesting.” She scrolled quickly to a stop on the luminous blue screen of her handheld. “Here,” she pointed. “And here. Mutation at this point…this point…”

“MAO-A1 defect—severe, too. Whoever our Roman is, you wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side. Thanks, Sarah.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait. Where do we keep the backup files on those old control studies?”

Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1000h

Ari was glad to have his team around him again. The squat little detective he called Toad stood as usual in the corner, hands in pockets, while Miner—an engineer with a peninsular nose and a gift for detail—towered over piles of evidence laid out in plastic bags on the table. In Miner’s lab, they could get some work done. Ari had scattered photos and a diagram of the Sancta Sanctorum on the table.

“See?” Ari gestured at the diagram and measured the air with his arms. “The Pope never gets closer than two meters from the altar. First, the chest shots—big arterial splash on the floor. Then a head shot, a smaller spray mark here. Then a long blood trail to the exit. And now we know the blood on the altar isn’t the Pope’s: it belongs to Chandos.”

Miner was excited. “But Chandos falls where he shoots himself, too far away to get so much blood spray on the altar.”

“But that’s the point,” Ari said. “He couldn’t have shot himself. There must have been a third person in that room. Either somebody shot him and moved him, which isn’t likely because there are no drag marks; or somebody carried his blood to the altar and scattered it there.”

“What possible reason would anyone have to do that?” Miner asked.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last two days.” Ari boosted himself up on the table and sat to compose himself, trying to decide how to make sense to his team.

“Why scatter blood on an altar? To make atonement. To pay for transgression. It’s all in Leviticus—the priest slaughters the sacrifice, collects the blood, and sprinkles it on the altar. It was done in the Temple of Solomon.”

Miner interrupted, smirking. “So, your idea is this—the killer breaks through an impenetrable cordon of police, draws on the Monsignor and the Pope, shoots the Monsignor and collects his blood to perform some ancient ceremony, shoots the Pope as the only witness, and then escapes—again, through an impenetrable line of police who are rushing the place. Oh, and all within about five minutes.”

To himself, Ari added, “And while carrying a big wooden icon in a fifty-kilo silver frame.” He looked silently at Miner and made a face, hesitating. “All right. I’m waiting to hear your explanation.”

“Simple. Just what the police said. Chandos shoots the Pope and, while standing next to the altar, shoots himself, spraying blood across it. He staggers a few steps and topples where they find him.”

“You don’t ‘stagger a few steps’ with that kind of injury: you drop where you are. Even the police admitted that. And there were no staggering footprints and no blood trail. Your theory doesn’t work.”

“It’s more likely than yours…a mysterious third party in there carrying out some bizarre ceremony.”

“Sha. Just let me finish. The killer sprinkles blood on the altar, which makes the whole thing a ritual murder. There’s more. The killer then removes the Monsignor’s red sash from his robe and wraps it around his head. Now, why would he do that?”

“Chandos did it himself,” Miner shot back. “After firing at the Pope, he decided to hang himself with his sash. But the Pope escaped from the room. Chandos realized he had no time, so he shot himself instead.”

Ari considered this, examining the photos of the chapel that lay on the table and slowly shaking his head. Miner’s view was plausible, but wrong. The photos were not clear enough to show this, but Ari had seen the chapel for himself. The Monsignor’s blood on the altar was not like the wound sprays he had examined so many times before—it had been flung there.

“All right,” Miner said. “Tell me why the ‘killer’ would wrap the Monsignor’s sash around his head.”

“It’s another ritual. I checked this with my father this morning. The ancient priesthood would choose a goat to carry away the sins of Israel—they called it the scapegoat—and they tied a red cord around its horns to symbolize the blood guilt of the people.”

“Therefore,” Miner picked up, “our ritual murderer not only killed the Pope but also transferred his own guilt to a scapegoat and sacrificed him, too?”

“Not quite. There’s tension in the Catholic Church over this Pope. According to some, he was a heretic. A betrayer of the faith. He changed a lot of things, like allowing women to be priests and so forth, and a good many people have made a row over it. Maybe somebody thought he needed to be stopped. Chandos was the Pope’s man, and maybe that same person thought Chandos would make a good scapegoat—you know, in the ordinary sense. To make it look like Chandos did the deed.”

“So…a religious nutter is behind everything.”

Ari jumped from the table. “How many times have we dealt with this sort of thing? We live in the center of it all. You know the Jerusalem Syndrome…a perfectly ordinary tourist cracks, gets up on the Old City wall and declares he’s the Messiah. A nun sits in the Via Dolorosa and gouges her hands and feet until she bleeds like Jesus. A crazy businessman from Jakarta sets himself on fire to protest the infidels in Palestine. We’re surrounded by it. We even have a special hospital for religious cranks.”

“And these things add up to what?” Miner was a little impatient. “How does any of this help explain the murder of Emanuel Shor and the theft of the whatsit?”

“Two things. Both victims wore gold rings with the same inscription.”

“Right. ‘Until he comes who has the right to rule.’ ”

“Suppose there was some cultic connection between them. Everything I saw in France points to it.”

“An Orthodox Jewish scientist and a Catholic priest? That’s some cult,” Miner snickered.

“That’s the second thing. A missing DNA sample belonging to someone named Chandos—the only missing sample from a locker our victim probably entered minutes before the murder. And it happens to bear the name of our Catholic priest.”

Miner looked chastened. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe it does. When I was in France I saw a sculpture, a statue of Saint Peter, the first Pope. He was dressed in the robes, not of a Pope, but of the cohen gadol, the High Priest of Israel. The special breastplate with the twelve stones, the turban. Look at this.” Ari flicked at his GeM and up on the wall came the image of the high priest from the Tanakh. Then a photo of the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of Chartres cathedral.

“The same costume.”

Miner shook his head. “What are you getting at?”

“I think I understand.” Toad spoke for the first time, and Ari looked at him hopefully. “Catholics see the Pope as the successor to the high priest of Israel. The statue shows that. But according to Torah, the high priest must be a cohen, a direct descendant of Aharon ben-Amram. If Chandos believes he is himself such a person, he considers Zacharias illegitimate.”

“Thus the DNA sample in the Cohanic collection,” Miner concluded. “Sara Alman is typing the Monsignor’s DNA at Technion right now. I wonder what she’s found out.” He made a call on his GeM and stepped out of the room.

Ari and Toad looked at each other. “I didn’t know he was still in touch with her,” Ari said. “She’s at Technion?”

“She’s working on the Tay-Sachs problem.”

“I guess there’s always hope.”

Toad smiled without humor, and Ari left the subject.

“So…you’ve been quiet.”

Toad gazed at nothing for a few moments, and then asked, “Why would a Catholic priest want to know if he’s a cohen? What difference would it make to him?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that somebody carried out a Jewish ritual in that chapel—which, by the way, is called the Holy of Holies. Blood was strewn on the altar. The scapegoat was marked.”

“It could be. It is intriguing.” Toad’s bland face hid the workings inside. He was neither surprised nor disappointed that the answer was not simple. In his experience, crime involved the most complicated of motives. No crime was simple.

“Think about whoever did this. Everyone is guilty but you. You’re the real victim. The world is a standing violation of everything you cherish. You’re a soldier.”

Toad hesitated. Ari was surprised to hear Toad expound like this, but any entrance into his mind was worth taking. He leaned forward to listen.

“Think about how you carried out the shootings: all of them commando-style. To you, these were not murders—they were acts of war.” He paused. “What we have to figure out is, what is the nature of the war?”

Miner came back in the room. “They’ve just got the results on the Monsignor. Hold on—you won’t believe it. The profile of Peter Chandos shows 95 percent on the Cohanic scale.”

“The Monsignor was a Jew?” Ari cried.

“Not only a Jew, but what a Jew. An almost pure match to the cohen gadol haplotype, whatever that is.”

“A haplotype is like a fingerprint,” said Toad. “The man who died in that chapel was one of the priesthood of Israel…”

They looked at each other, wondering.

“So?” Miner asked, “What difference does it make? There are tens of thousands of Cohanic men in the world. Why should it matter that much to him? Could it have been some kind of…hobby?”

“Shor removed the sample without going through procedures. And on a high holy day.” Toad pointed out. “Why would he go to all that trouble for a trifle? Why the secrecy?”

“He’s protecting somebody. A client.”

“A very important client. So important that Shor is willing to do aven and break the law.”

Miner spoke up. “Maybe Shor knew Chandos. Maybe he was doing him a favor by profiling his DNA for him against the Cohanic type, then saw the news and decided he wanted nothing further to do with him. So, he grabbed the sample and erased all references. Simple.”

“And then casually went out to be murdered?” Ari asked sarcastically.

“Why should Shor’s murder have anything to do with Chandos? It happened elsewhere. Different building, different crime. We should be looking at the robbery instead of this religious mumbo-jumbo. Isn’t 99 percent of police work about following the money?”

All three were quiet for a moment. A draft of air from the building’s useless cooling system ruffled the piles of evidence on the table. The laboratory clock hummed overhead.

Ari wondered for a moment if chasing these ancient ghosts could end up as a fatal detour. Maybe he and Toad were overcomplicating things. Maybe the nature of this war was totally clear, and the oblique connections they had made were simply fog. Maybe it was the same old story—not a new one after all.

“Well, if Miner’s right, we’ve been going down a cul-de-sac. For argument’s sake, let’s leave off Chandos for a minute.”

“Wait.” All at once Miner was looking puzzled at the GeMscreen in his hand. “There’s another message from Sara. It looks like Chandos also had MAO-A mutation.” He spelled it out carefully and looked up at Ari, who shrugged.

“Let me see that,” Toad asked for the GeM and examined it carefully. “MAO-A mutation pre-disposes a person to aggression and violence. The head of the institute told me that. It’s their main research project right now.”

“You’re saying that killing might have come naturally to Chandos?” Ari was surprised. “I thought the man was a saint.”

“And there is still the eyelash. And the inscription on the rings,” Toad reminded them.

Miner sighed and took back the GeM. “I guess we won’t be leaving off Chandos.”

Magisterial Library of the Order of Malta, Via Condotti, Rome, 1000h

The sealed letter from Jean-Baptiste Mortimer was more than Maryse needed. The Director knew what was wanted before she asked for it and had prepared a small, elegant study for her use. A man known to her by reputation as a retired historian—and an eminent one—he closed the door silently behind him, seated her at the table, and opened a cabinet in the wall with an old-fashioned iron key. From this cabinet he drew a book, one of the most ornate she had ever seen, and carefully laid it on the table in front of her. The leather cover featured scrollwork illuminated with four figures—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged angel.

The administrator smiled tensely and locked the door as he left. Maryse took out her magnifying glass and went directly to work. The book was old and broken-backed. She learned it had never been digitized and existed only in this form. Most of the writing had faded long ago. The further back in time, the more fluid it was, until it became nearly unreadable, but there were some fresher entries dating from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

“Chandos…Chandos,” she murmured, her nose and eyes itching at the veil of dust that hung over the book. She was grateful for the cotton gloves that protected her fingers from the old binding. The light was dim and the script too small to read easily, so after an hour or so of examining the book she leaned her head back against the chair and rubbed her head, eyes closed, thinking through the willowy descent charts she had been studying. There was no coherent story, but the fragments of Latin next to the illuminated names were beginning to come together for her.

HIC RICARDUS CORDIS LEONIS REX ANGLORUM…

King Richard the Lion Heart of England, who in 1193 quit the siege of the Temple of Solomon. …Robert de Sablé, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, his knight companion…

HIC DOM. GULIELMUS CARNUTENSIS…

Monseigneur William of Chartres, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, knight companion, 1210…

So, this Lord of Chartres was Grand Master while the Cathedral was under construction.

HIC DOM. IACOBIMUS MOL…

Monseigneur Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, who in 1293 paid homage in secret to King Edward as companion-in-arms as his predecessors had done. The last of the Grand Masters to do so. In 1314, burned at the stake at Paris falsely convicted of heresy…

Of course, the story of de Molay was well known. The execution of the last Grand Master of the Templars was a medieval scandal. She seemed to remember that someone had uncovered a document in the Vatican not many years ago, said to be a pardon from the Pope for Jacques de Molay. What she hadn’t known was that the Grand Master had paid homage “in secret” to Edward of England as a knight companion. Another piece in the puzzle fell into place.

King Edward III and his son Edward the Black Prince, who in 1348 instituted the Most Noble Order of the Garter with twenty four knights companions…

Sir John Chandos of the Garter, companion to Edward the Black Prince and hero of the Hundred Years’ War. Although as strategist of Poitiers he had won vast territories of France for the English King, he was honored even by his enemies as a peacemaker. He died in 1370 of battle wounds at the Chateau Mortemer. The Chronicles of Froissart said of him, “It was a great pity he was slain, for he was so wise and full of devices, he would have found some means of establishing a peace between France and England”…

She would have liked to photograph the pages, but they had politely taken her GeM from her. So she took a few notes. Genealogical lines continued for generations, occasionally diverted down unexpected channels by revolution, sterility, or murder.

She had not anticipated following so many royal lines. A dried-up sinecure passed over centuries from one old aristocratic lion to another, until the twentieth century brought things to a crisis point.

At last, she arrived at the end of an errant string of names that looked promising:

Major Sir John Chandos, KCB, DSO, MC, Royal Dragoons Guards. b. Derby, April 13, 1908, d. Beirut, May 31, 1987. Mentioned in dispatches from the Levant Campaign, 1941.

That was all. A Knight of the Bath, a holder of the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross—a British officer of some accomplishment. This information she wrote down carefully. It was not as extensive as she had hoped, but the regiment and dates were useful. Here the line ended abruptly.

A page had been removed.

She contemplated the blank book for a moment, then grasped that she had gone as far as she could here. She reached for her GeM before realizing it was in the librarian’s hands.

A few minutes later she was in the Via dei Condotti, walking quickly past the high-fashion shops toward the Spanish Steps. In one of the vitrines, a digital projection of a model danced, wearing a dress priced at 17,000 euros. Shopping all around her were women who looked as if they too had been electronically projected into the street, women wearing the blistering gold and orange of autumn, trailing perfumes, admiring their own airy skin in the window glass.

Maryse caught sight of herself. Her face looked red and Irish and irritated in the cold morning sun. So intent for so long on the spirit, she was startled by her flesh; so she walked faster toward the shade of a small café looking up at the famous Steps.

She ordered tea with lemon and concentrated on a GeMsearch, reading rapidly through screen after screen.

Royal Dragoons Guards. Took part in the 1936 peacekeeping mission to Palestine. Withdrawn in 1939, evacuated from Dunkirk, recommitted to the invasion of Germany. Thousands of names scrolled past. Every medal awarded, every soldier, every serving officer for the past century was listed.

But her search requests found no mention of Major Sir John Chandos of the Royal Dragoons. Not a whisper. She squinted at her notes again to make sure of the dates and the spellings. It was odd that there should be nothing—he had, after all, been a Knight of the Order of Malta as well.

She called up her electronic dossier of Peter Chandos. Born in Besharri, Lebanon, 1985. Mother called Rafqa Chandos, father unknown. Attended Maronite schools. Ordained 2007.

Abruptly, Maryse looked up at a cluster of priests passing the café, all young men in black cassocks and white bands, arguing about the forthcoming conclave. Their Italian was too loud and fast for her to follow. One of them caught her looking at him and grinned back at her, making a wry face—he was slender, his skin the smooth color of clay, his eyes a clear brown.

It was getting warm. She took off her coat and breathed in the air of the piazza, seeing all at once the swift life coursing around her.

Cohen Brothers, Yavne Street, Tel Aviv, 1220h

“Shimon Tempelman to see Ivan Luel.”

The office administrator was a squinting young woman whose face glowed blue-green in the low light of the corridor. She was surrounded by cabinets that shone like steel. Her computer screen lit up the cosmetic glasses she wore; a really good—and younger—policeman might be able to read that screen in her eyes just by getting into an attentive conversation with her, Tempelman thought. He wondered how much easier it would be if he had proper eyesight. As Director of Security for the Technion University, he tried to keep to himself the reality that his eyes were fading.

“Mr. Luel will be with you directly. He’s telephoning.” She mirrored his English accent with one of her own—she was clearly one of the top form of secretaries. “He will have only a few minutes for you, Mr. Tempelman. He has an engagement with a client.”

“Thank you. My business will take only a few minutes.”

He looked around at the glassy walls and the fluid-looking art and thought about the sums of money that flowed invisibly through these law offices. Patent law, he knew, was a form of the old protection racket—you pay enough and no one will raid your claim. His old mother had wanted him to be a lawyer because she admired professional men who never got their hands dirty, unlike his father who had been a jeweler down a lane in South London. An open invitation to thieves, the old man’s shop was a warren of caged bracelets and watches covered in carbon dust. He always complained that the inventory never moved. Well, it moved whenever the local villains paid a call, Tempelman chuckled to himself. He had learned a good deal from those men, his father’s most faithful customers—enough to become a policeman smarter than most. Smart enough to stay out of actual police work and lead a comfortable life “protecting” other people’s treasured secrets from the kind of villains he had known in his youth.

Now here he was again. It was his profession, he had to admit: one sinecure after another won by allowing important people just enough of a glimpse of his considerable intelligence to be satisfied of his reliability. He was too smart to require much—pettiness was the best defense against customer revolt, he had learned—and too smart to reveal much. He had found that people were more threatened by enigma than by certainty. He gained his ambassadorship by dropping hints to a junior Cabinet minister about some artworks trafficked through back channels out of Britain. Alas, the art was never traced. But he had done a creditable job, and the references he carried in his GeM were impeccable, ready to be beamed to the chief partner of the Tel Aviv office of Cohen Brothers.

In the past, he had often debated with himself about the kind of return he would accept for his investments. Sometimes it was a position, sometimes a promotion—with a few off-the-books benefits. Police officials were always looking for clever men and willing to provide extra incentives. In this case, however, there was no debate. He knew exactly what he wanted from Mr. Ivan Luel.

Just a small share. Nothing noticeable. Just enough to provide for a comfortable retirement on a Greek island with a nice golf course. Crete, perhaps. A minuscule share of what was coming—that was all he asked. Hardly worth discussing. He was not ambitious.

Ambition was for others. He knew he would have made a remarkably good policeman—but to what end? What was the return on good police work? The best police end up acclaimed and poor. Or acclaimed and dead. At least he had been smart enough to do the job without bypassing the opportunities that came his way. Most of the people he had worked with were hopeless. This lot investigating the murder of Emanuel Shor—they were either stupid or seriously distracted. Clearly the Levine woman was behind it all; she had cooked the patents so she could sell the rights to the highest bidder on the side. She had duped her uncle into letting a contract killer into the lab and had probably arranged for the instrument itself to be sold to yet another bidder. A dangerous game, the double cross, but common among greedy criminals who imagined they could play it and then escape the consequences.

He had done his research on Cohen Brothers and was reasonably sure she was playing solitary. She would go down for it tidily. Thus, everyone who deserved to would win—the old law firm would maintain its credibility, and he would be set up for life.

Still, there was the odd business of Shor’s visit to his genetics lab just before the murder. Tempelman didn’t like unexplained details. Shor had been utterly Orthodox: it was unthinkable that he would go to the office on the Sabbath. The old man was undoubtedly duped into opening the Nanotechnology Center, but why go to his own laboratory? To collect an electronic key? No, the key he used for the genetics center was coded for his brother’s lab as well. There was the police theory that Shor had removed a DNA sample from the lab. Why would he break the Sabbath and a Holy Day for that, unless he were protecting someone?

Tempelman had pondered all of this while working on a hard turn in the fairway at the Caesarea golf club. Sometimes when the ball goes wrong into deep rough, he thought, it isn’t worth the trouble to go looking for it. Was this one of those times? But he didn’t have the leisure for worrying about it now—Catriel Levine was about to leave the country, Interpol had identified the eyelash, and he had to move quickly. Crete was calling.

At one time it had suited him to become Israeli rather than British. A certain deputy minister of state at Whitehall had encouraged him to emigrate “to prevent a serious hindrance to his career.” He had played on the minister a good deal and had, unwisely, crossed a dangerous threshold with him. But the minister was Labour and had scruples, so Tempelman was allowed to leave Britain freely and even to carry the minister’s highest recommendation for future employment. Israel was open to any Jewish person; there was need for good security people; and the climate was perfect for golf. Judaizing his name eased the way into the country.

But now there would be no need to stay. With enough money, he could find refuge on a small acreage overlooking the Mediterranean, maybe an olive orchard, perhaps a pool. He would have time to work on the flaws in his golf game.

Still, something was wrong. His thoughts kept returning to Shor, to the detour to the genetics lab. Shor was an odd man, it was true—obsessed with his Judaism, dressed day after day in the same sloppy white shirt with the cords of his tallit flying around him—but he had never broken any security protocols. Lots of the eccentrics at Technion had amused themselves at cat-and-mouse with Tempelman over security systems, playing graceless jokes he had come to expect. But never Shor. It wouldn’t have occurred to him. The man had no joking in him. If he had been fooled into opening the Nanoelectronics lab, might he have been fooled into recovering something incriminating from his own lab? The Shin Bet wouldn’t tell Tempelman whose DNA sample had gone missing—perhaps it was the killer’s? No. If so, the case would have been closed by now. Anyway, he knew that the missing sample was from the Cohanic collection, hardly controversial in contrast to the much more sensitive MAO-A collection. Again, the return on such a remarkable investment seemed troublingly small to him. There was something unclear about all of this, something blocking his mental line of sight.

But whatever the complications might be, the man behind the office door would undoubtedly be glad to make a small investment of his own to satisfy Tempelman. That was simple enough and all he cared about. For Tempelman, the details of a case were interesting only as far as they hinted at some advantage to himself. After today, he would be totally focused on burying himself in superb isolation.

“Mr. Luel should finish soon,” the woman with glasses said. “I’m taking my lunch now. When he rings, please go in.” She stood and walked past him, the skin of her face and amazing long legs shining green in the glow of the windows. His eyes followed her out the door.

Just as she promised, after a few moments, a small buzzer sounded on the desk. Tempelman picked up his case and pushed open the office door.

The man in the chair was not Ivan Luel; he knew that straightaway.

Kibbutz En Gedi, Israel, 1220h

Ari missed the cold weather he had left behind in Europe; here he felt throttled by the heat. Jammed into his little car, he and Toad and Miner sped along the road between the Judean cliffs and the baking blue Dead Sea. They passed few vehicles on the road; the heat was too intense here at the lowest place on the planet.

Passing the Qumran historical site where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been taken out of pocky caves in the cliffside, they could see the unlikely green groves of En Gedi flowing over the escarpment overhead. Soon the kibbutz gate opened for them.

A welcome breeze met them as they got out of the car, and Ari reflected that this must be the only cool place in the whole country. The waterfalls of En Gedi looked shrunken, but a faint freshness hung over the hilltop. A male ibex, its horns curving nearly into its back, stood under a tree nearby watching them. I could live here, Ari thought; in this place, even kibbutz life might be all right.

Jules Halevy and his wife emerged from their tiny house to greet them. “Shalom, shalom, welcome!” Halevy repeated as he ushered the three policemen into the house. “Air-conditioned, you see.” Halevy grinned at them and offered drinks, which the three men accepted thirstily. Ari introduced the others.

“Thank you for seeing us. I’m Inspector Davan; this is Mr. Kara and Mr. Sefardi.” Both Halevys shook hands vigorously, smilingly. Although Toad had questioned them briefly several days before, they didn’t seem to remember him.

Looking around, Ari noted that the walls were covered with woven hangings, some of an abstract design, others with bitmapped pictures of palm trees and bearded prophets. It was comfortably cool in the room, and Ari sat back to assess the host. Halevy was stout, short, and dressed in what looked like homemade clothes: a tunic with no shape and trousers in the tannish color of raw linen. Barefoot, he folded himself into a ball on a low sofa and rubbed rapidly at his brief beard the color of fog.

“Now, how can we help you?”

Toad and Miner looked bemused at Ari. It had been his idea to come here. Back in Miner’s cellar, they had conceded to him that religion might have had something to do with the death of Emanuel Shor. Neither man was religious, and Miner was positively allergic to it. Toad’s convictions, if there were any, had never been discussed.

“The inscription on the rings is the key,” Ari had said.

“The key to what? You say it comes from a Bible verse, I can’t remember what…”

“Until he comes whose right it is to reign,” Toad had reminded them; then he had picked up a photo from the pile of evidence on Miner’s table and displayed it to them. The model of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem that sat on the grounds of the Holyland Hotel. And, on the back of the photo, six Hebrew letters scrawled by hand:

עבאלהם

“Did you ever find out what these letters refer to?” Ari to Toad, who had shaken his head.

“I asked the brother and the niece—they said they didn’t know. But now I wonder…”

Ari had run out of the room to his office, the other two behind him, to look in the big Hebrew Bible on his desk. It was hard to take the stairs and study his GeM at the same time, but he found the Latin Bible verse he had photographed in Chartres.

…DONEC VENIRET CUIUS EST IUDICIUM.

Then the same verse in Hebrew. At last he had found it, with Toad and Miner looking over his shoulder.

“A, B, A, L, H, M…” Ari breathed:

עַד־בֹּא אֲשֶׁר־לֹו הַמִּשְׁפָּט

Ad-bo asher-lo ha-mishpat

“It’s Ezekiel. It’s the same. ‘Until he comes whose right it is’,” Ari translated. “Let’s go talk to Shor’s friends.”

So they had driven an hour from Jerusalem to the hills of En Gedi.

Ari held up the photo and read off the inscription.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Halevy said, smiling. Ari had been through this before. “It’s a passage from Tanakh, you say? Echezquel?” An odd sort of accent.

Ari decided to take a back route. “What was your relationship with Emanuel Shor?”

“Long, long relationship. Friends for years now, with Emanuel and with his brother Nathan. My wife virtually raised his niece Catriel.”

“How did you meet?”

“Common interest. We both came to the Holy Land about the same time, he from Russia, myself from France, both from Orthodox families. He escaped from the nasty Soviets, I escaped from a government high-rise outside of Paris. There was a small synagogue and a kosher food store, a little Jewish island in a sea of Muslims. I was always afraid, and so was my father. Afraid of the Muslims, the Arabs. They were moving in. So we moved out.”

“And, you were saying, a common interest?”

“Oh, yes. Well. I went to university, the Technion, you know. I studied particle physics. I became a physicist. And Emanuel Shor was there too.”

“He was biology, you were physics. The common interest?”

“No, no. Not that. The common interest was…Rachel here.”

The woman seated in the corner smirked at this. She sat upright, both hands around a sweating glass of tea, her face like a tired peasant’s. She was dressed in a light sheath that echoed the intense, athletic brown of her hands and feet. “It’s not true. He likes to say that, but Emanuel Shor was not interested in me. He teased me; we were friends. No,” she said, smiling painfully, straightening even more in her chair. “No. The common interest was the Temple.”

“The Temple. You mean, the ancient Temple.”

“Yes,” she replied in a quiet, yielding voice. “We met Emanuel at meetings of the Mishmar, our group that is devoted to rebuilding the Temple. Without the Temple, we can never truly see the face of God, as Moses did. We can never welcome his Messiah.”

“Let me explain,” Halevy interrupted, smiling humorlessly at his wife. “We believe that the Messiah will not come until the Jewish nation rebuilds the Temple. It is preordained.”

Rachel spoke again. “Every year, three times a year, we gather and march to the Temple Mount. At Passover, at Shavuot, and again during the High Holy Days. We do it to show God that we have not abandoned Him, that we remember the commandment. That there are still Jews who have not bowed to Baal. We know that it is not possible to build the Temple now with the Muslim shrines in its place. But we want to show God that we are willing, that we remember. And that is why we prepare.”

“Prepare what?”

“Let me show you,” she whispered, as if sharing a secret. The three policemen stood as Rachel went to a large covered wicker basket in the corner of the room. Jules Halevy stayed in his chair as if frozen.

She opened the basket and pulled out heavy, shapeless folds of fabric. At first Ari thought it was a set of curtains, but she held up a piece. It was a large tunic, creamy white, woven in a peculiar fishbone pattern. “Pure linen. As required by the Law.”

“What is it?” Ari felt he shouldn’t touch it.

“This is the robe of the cohen gadol—the High Priest of Israel. It is the robe he will wear when he enters the Holy of Holies on the great Day of Atonement, to cleanse all of Israel. When the Temple is rebuilt.”

“Why do you have it here?”

She smiled and laid the robe carefully over the basket. “It took us years to construct it. I am a weaver—a docent at the National Museum. I show tourists how cloth was woven anciently. But even I couldn’t reproduce this. We had to study and pray and try again and again. At last we built a loom big enough to do this work, and now…Well, we have paid the price.”

“The price?”

“All things must be in readiness for the Messiah when he comes. We must prepare carefully in order to merit the blessing. Someone must do this.” She leaned into the basket again. “See? Here? The priestly cap and the shoes,” she said, holding up three amorphous pieces of the same linen fabric.

“It should be under guard,” Toad spoke suddenly. Everyone turned in surprise to look at him, but that was all he had to say.

Rachel Halevy carefully folded the priest’s wardrobe and returned it to the basket. “I keep it here. No one will take it. No one is interested in it,” she sighed.

“I am very interested in it,” Ari offered. “Mrs. Halevy, you mentioned the cohen gadol, the high priest of Israel. Was Emanuel Shor looking for such a person?”

“Looking for him?” She seemed surprised at the question. “Of course, he was looking for him. We all are. There can be no sacrifice in the Temple until an authentic cohen, a genuine descendant of Aharon ben-Amram, the brother of Moses, comes forward to take his rightful place.”

“Did Emanuel Shor find him?”

It was Jules Halevy’s turn. “Dr. Shor had a theory that he might be able to narrow down the genome of the original Aharonic family. Enough to isolate a pure haplotype. Then it would be a matter of locating an individual who fits. But I don’t see what any of this has to do with his murder.”

“It may have nothing to do with his murder, Dr. Halevy, but we have evidence that the Cohanim project might have a bearing.”

“The Cohanim project?” Halevy blustered. “I thought Shor was killed over the lattice.”

“The lattice?” Ari looked at his friends, who shrugged almost imperceptibly.

Halevy nearly choked. “You mean, you don’t know…” He rolled his eyes and collapsed back into his chair.

“The thing that was stolen from Levinsky’s lab, right?”

Halevy had no more to say on that subject. He simply stared at them. Ari turned again to his wife.

“Did Emanuel Shor find the cohen gadol?”

“I don’t know.” She pressed her lips together and looked away. “Candidly, I don’t. In all honesty, I never understood him very well. He seemed to want everything we wanted, but then…”

Ari was silent, waiting for her to continue. Suddenly she cried out, as much to her husband as to him. “Emanuel Shor was a peaceful man! Peace was all he really wanted. He went through the remains of dead bodies like a healer, like a saint. Then for him die as he did—it was blasphemy. A curse. Everything has gone wrong…”

Sobbing, she left the room.

Libris Café, Yavne Street, Tel Aviv, 1230h

Catriel Levine, chief patent attorney for the Technion University, sat down at a table on the pavement and ordered tea. Even in the black suit she wore, the heat did not touch her. Catriel could not remember being warm: her bones always felt cold inside, and today her thin skin bristled easily in the drafts from the sea. She checked her silvery GeM. The job would be done soon, and then she could leave for the airport.

A circle of young men stood nearby, Orthodox Jews, the threads of the tallit hanging from their white shirts, arguing playfully about something: a point of Talmud, or maybe a bus schedule. She looked at their straight, thin backs and the coils of youthful beard and wondered again at the gulf between herself and the life of the street looping around her.

That life, which she had never wanted but still watched from a distance, was now closed to her firmly and finally. What she had done about her uncle had been necessary, although no court would ever see it that way. In Tanakh, a woman named Yael lured the destroyer of Israel into her tent and hammered an iron spike through his head while he slept. Was what she had done so different? Wasn’t the Temple of God worth it? Why did she not feel the triumph of Yael? Why did she feel instead like King David after he contrived the death of Uriah—a calm despair at what she had done? And now she was about to add to the pain.

She stirred the tea and drank, longing for its warmth. This café was a refuge, an old bookstore with a tea bar, the kind of place where time meant little and there were books instead of blazing, blaring screens. A book lay open in front of her, one of those Russian novels that her uncle was always encouraging her to read. But today she hadn’t read a word.

She needed to harden herself. The events of the next hour would all take place out of her sight, but she would be there anyway—and in her mind she would be there from now on. This task, although unforeseen, was necessary too. Tempelman had brought it on himself. He was a sly, distasteful character with no family. He would not be missed—indeed, the world would be better without him. Still, she hoped she would not be able to visualize it, or at worst that one day other visions would crowd it out. It would be soon. Already the picture the police had given her of her uncle’s death was beginning to fade.

He had not suffered, they said. A bullet to the head, apparently—they had been vague about it. Quick and final. That night in her bathroom she had looked at herself in the mirror and, for an instant, saw a thing, not a person—a murderer. But then reason flowed over the impression. Emanuel Shor, the uncle she had loved all her life, a traitor. Not only that—he had tried to enlist her as well. For a long time, he said, his eye had been on her as his “disciple.” When she began to understand his meaning, it immobilized her heart; her kindly uncle changed into a creature with hair over his eyes and lips, with a chemical odor and an expertise in deceit. He was just another treacherous man after all.

And men did not have hearts. Certainly not her father, Nathan Levinsky—nor her Uncle Emmanuel, contrary to what she had always believed. Even Jules Halevy, their closest friend, a blustering doctrinaire who couldn’t distinguish between talk and action. She had been vague with him about the money and the Texan, and he had gone around with an inflated head ever since, delighting in the secret as if it had been his idea. And then one of the partners at Cohen Brothers had liked her—a tall, physically beautiful man named Ivan. For him, she had felt nothing but contempt. Ivan used the law miraculously, like an alchemist who could charm gold out of bare rock. He enriched himself almost effortlessly, and his methods were very useful in achieving her agreement with the Americans. But she could visualize herself manipulated by such a man and grew sick at the thought. When he looked at her, his eyes narrated the complex and tedious dance he would lead her through to its inevitable endpoint.

No, no one would best her. She would not be stopped—certainly not by a smarmy little blackmailing policeman like Shimon Tempelman.

Yet, as Talmud says, in the death of one man, all humankind dies.

Never mind. She would fly to Dallas, secure from this minor threat. Unpleasant, but necessary.

The Arab wasn’t troubled; in fact, he seemed unsurprised, even serene about it, as if he had known it was coming. Strange how much she could tell about him, even though he had never shown his face to her. She had not even tried to figure out how he managed to leave his little signals unnoticed, how she would find a crumpled envelope or a sweet wrapper near her place at the café and suddenly see a pattern in it. She knew she had passed him on the street more than once, but did not know him from any other unshaven Palestinian sulking his way to work. All that she really wanted to know was that he guaranteed results—with finality.

She remembered when she put out feelers for such a person and was surprised at how quickly she found him. Once or twice she had the vague impression that he had been looking for her, not the other way round. He wanted to be known only as “the Arab,” as if there were only one Arab in the world. He had persuaded her, although she had not thought she needed persuading, that violence was as neutral a thing as diplomacy—as useful for good ends as for evil ones. And, he insisted, he served only good ends.

They had first met at dusk on a bench in the terrace park overlooking the Baha’i monument in Haifa. She never saw his face, only his reflection in a darkened street lamp. He did not like electronic communication, he said; it was not ephemeral enough for him. There would be no phone calls, no messaging—only talks, in the shadows. He told her to watch for small wads of paper, which she should then destroy. Would there be a code of some kind, she asked? He laughed quietly and said she would understand.

And she did. Walking in the park as instructed on the afternoon of New Year, she found a rutted, crinkly note on that same bench. Unfolding it, she recognized the Hebrew word for “finished” in the creases of the paper. She would not forget the view of Haifa from that bench that afternoon. A hazy, hot October day, the park filled with picnickers, and her heart frozen.

There was more. Where to find the object, how to pay him, how to contact him again if she needed him. He was like an accommodating auto repairman, and the fees were reasonable.

The aftermath was as she had predicted. She had iced herself against the police and remained quiet, even in the face of the reptilian little man from Shin Bet who appeared to know what she was thinking. Far worse was the agony of her father. The only way to deal with her own heart was by candid refutation. Not murder but pre-emption; not a breaking of law but a carrying out of law. Her father would understand if only he were able to bear understanding.

Then Tempelman had come along with his sneering inferences. Again, she was surprised at the Arab’s promptness answering her call—it was a little chilling. A paper napkin carelessly folded under a cup of hot tea. Only two questions: Who, by When. No Why. Again, a few whispers on a warm evening in the park. Closure guaranteed.

This item of business concluded, she would be able to board the plane leaving nothing pending. First to Paris, then the long flight to Texas. There would at last be the kind of power only unlimited money can buy. Catriel felt around in her bag and was reassured at the touch of the small GeM-like device she carried. Soon the world would be flooded with such devices, and soon after that the Temple would begin to rise on the holy mount. For this, she reasoned against reason, her uncle needed to die.

She looked at her little silver GeM clock and realized that it was past time. A signal would be waiting for her in the lavatory at Cohen Brothers. She had felt it unnecessary, but the man had insisted. He always closed his accounts, he said. Catriel paid for the tea, returned the book, and walked down this street of cafés and legal offices toward her chambers. People were scarce on the pavement because of the heat. It was mid-afternoon, but the city seemed ghostly, almost deserted. It was the High Holy Days.

Cohen Brothers—New York, London, Tel Aviv. She paused and touched the brass plate in the lobby of the high-rise—surprising herself, as she had never felt anything for the firm. Still, she would not be coming back. She had left a message for her father and for the Halevys; she would not miss the jowly old men, and she didn’t believe they would miss her; only Rachel would weep a little. The cataract of money would astound them. Jules Halevy would figure out what to do with it eventually. Her father she would not be able to face. But maybe the day would come, after he was gone, when she could return to see new construction on the Temple Mount.

The lift opened into the cool glassy corridor that led to the chambers of Cohen Brothers. Catriel was relieved that everyone was at lunch and the office was quiet; she wanted to get in and out quickly. Pushing on the lavatory door, she glimpsed herself in the mirror.

It was then she realized she was not alone.

Cimitero degli Stranieri, Rome, 1200h

Only a few people were allowed into the cemetery for the committal of Monsignor Peter Chandos. It had rained intensely only minutes before, but the cold clouds opened and the sun turned the stone of the new tomb into a watery mirror. Maryse shaded her eyes. Three policemen in black uniforms and black gloves stood at a distance. The only other participants were the Commendatore of the Vatican Police, the Archpriest John Paul Stone, and Fatima Chandos, Peter’s wife. The funeral car standing nearby was unmarked, the gates of the cemetery locked.

Officially, this ceremony was not taking place.

It was a small, shallow tomb of black stone, unnamed, the lid open to receive the coffin, which the policemen had lowered inside. Stone read the service in English so that Fatima would understand it. His cavernous American voice was made for a much larger congregation than this one:

Our brother Peter has gone to his rest…May the Lord now welcome him to the table of God’s children in Heaven. With faith and hope in eternal life, let us assist him with our prayers. Let us pray to the Lord also for ourselves…

Maryse thought of the last funeral she had attended, and her throat constricted. Hundreds of people had come. Their shocked keening could be heard from the Priory Hall throughout the night—even after Maryse thought she had fallen asleep on her father’s bed, she could hear it. A moan filled the Vale of Glendalough that she could not distinguish from the continuing echo in her mind of her own cry at discovering her father dead.

And such a death. She had brought it on him. If he had not been with her, if he had been at home where he should be, it would not have happened.

At her father’s funeral, old boys from the Priory School brought their wives. People from town walked because of the long stream of parked cars along the lane, a persistent train of mourners in all shades of black, elderly veiled women from the farms, aged men who could hardly walk. They had all embraced her. Pure bad luck, they said, echoing the TV. Everyone said it. But it wasn’t. Only David Kane had known how she felt; only he had the cold facts of what had really happened. Strangely, he was the only one who had given her any comfort at all.

He had arrived in his helicopter, landing a mile down the road; and she watched for him walking up the lane with the others, taller and still formidable. It was the only time she had ever seen him wearing black. And it was the only time he had ever put his arms around her.

She was no further use to him, she had known that. Even if the publicity had not spun out of control, the hum of shock in her mind made her powerless to carry on. There was no strength left.

The days that followed were like a drawn-out eclipse of the sun. She had not seen Glendalough in green since then. The house belonged to the school; the head’s books were packed and donated to the school library; the only books she took were the ones her father had given her. And then she left. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she opened one of the brick-like art books just to look at it. She did not hear his voice or feel his presence, but she liked the pictures he had left her.

Our true home is in Heaven, and Jesus Christ whose return we long for will come from Heaven to save us…

Grant that our brother may sleep here in peace until you awaken him to glory, for you are the resurrection and the life. Then he will you see you face to face and in your light will see light…

As we bury here the body of our brother, deliver his soul from every bond of sin.

These words jarred her back to consciousness. A few paces away, Fatima Chandos stood like a pale, shuddering leaf between the sturdy figures of the Cardinal Archpriest and the Commendatore. Both seemed kind, able men, but Maryse knew that they were not really present to Fatima. She knew about the terrible, fateful tolling that Fatima heard in her imagining, about the shadow that stifled all her thoughts in her wakeful moments and suffocated her sleep.

Nevertheless, unlike Maryse, Fatima had something to awaken to in the morning, after the farewell. There would soon be a welcome. She was carrying the Monsignor’s child.

You raised the dead to life; give to our brother eternal life.

“Lord, have mercy,” Maryse whispered.

You promised Paradise to the repentant thief; bring Peter to the joys of Heaven.

“Lord, have mercy.”

Our brother was washed in baptism and anointed with the Holy Spirit; give him fellowship with all your saints.

“Lord, have mercy.”

He was nourished with your body and blood; grant him a place at the table in your heavenly kingdom.

“Lord, have mercy.”

After the Our Father, Fatima knelt slowly and kissed the coffin. Her face was drawn and dry as she stood. Then the policemen came forward and slid the cover into place over the sarcophagus.

“In this corner he will not be noticed,” Fatima said to Maryse, who had put an arm around the smaller woman. “That is a good thing.”

“It’ll remain unmarked for a while. We think that’s best—at least until some of the excitement dies down,” Stone responded. The Commendatore nodded.

“What will you do now?” Maryse asked Fatima.

“Go home. Go home and prepare for the child.” A little smile trembled on her face, and then was gone. “He will be fatherless, like his own father.”

“But he—or she—will have you,” Maryse tried to comfort her.

“Yes. He will have only me.”

They walked slowly together toward the gates with the men following.

“My mother left me when I was very young. My father was more than enough for me,” Maryse said.

“Was he? Was he really?” Fatima looked up at her, searching. The face looked unnaturally old, tired but hopeful.

Maryse answered with finality. “Yes, he was. He fed me, he taught me, he inspired me. He did all of that.”

“Then I can do all of that, too.”

She had known Fatima Chandos only days. A simple heart, she thought. Fatima’s touch warmed her hand, and she squeezed back.

“I can do it for both of us. We are at one now, you know. Peter and I. One flesh.” Fatima stopped to look back toward the tomb, now lost in a small city of tombs. The noon had grayed over again, and the glassy wet marble of the hundreds of monuments looked dull again.

Maryse spoke softly. “I won’t let it lie. If I can help it, there will be no stain on his memory.”

Fatima gave her a doubtful smile. “I hope so. He was a good, good man. I know this if others don’t. Every thought, every action of his was goodness. The last thing he did on the last morning of his life was for the children.”

“That last thing he did?”

“Yes, the shipment. He wanted the Pope to bless the shipment before it left.”

“What shipment?”

“Books, furniture, clothing, school uniforms for the children in my town. In Besharri.”

Maryse looked questioningly at the men.

“For the Antonine school he attended as a boy. And for the orphanage,” Stone clarified.

“In Lebanon.”

“Yes. There were two vans.” Stone saw that Maryse was suddenly intrigued. “It was a project of Peter’s, to give something back to his home town. The Pope blessed the vans only a few minutes before the…the end.”

Maryse made sure she understood. “Two vans blessed by the Pope, heading overland to Lebanon—and they left the piazza that morning?”

“Just so,” Fatima responded, giving Maryse a querying look.

“I’m sorry.” Her face flushed with shame; here she was, interrogating the widow at her husband’s funeral.

But Fatima hadn’t noticed. She was gazing back again toward the tomb of Peter Chandos.

Director’s Office, Shin Bet Headquarters, Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1445h

“What is the lattice?” Ari demanded to know.

He had requested a formal meeting with his superior. Tovah Kristall was mildly impressed at this; it had never happened before. Unlike some other operatives she detested who were forever submitting “formal requests” for this or that, Ari was the informal sort. She knew why he wanted this one. Everything would be recorded so that future reviewers would not be able to blame him for things he was ignorant of. So Alexa 3, the digital pyramid in the corner, now tracked their words.

Kristall looked into the dark brown eyes to gauge just how far off she could put him. In chess, patience was crucial. Her lips tensed. There was no leeway this time.

“Where did you hear of such a thing?” she snapped at him.

“From Jules Halevy,” he threw it back at her.

She reached for her GeM and barked at it. “Come in here.”

Her stick-thin assistant with the big eyes entered. “I want Jules Halevy’s clearance revoked immediately. I also want him brought here for questioning. Now.”

The assistant nodded and started out. “Not yet. Here.” She scribbled a note and handed it to the little man, who read it and left.

Then she turned fiercely back to Ari, but he was not intimidated.

“I’m not cleared to tell you anything about it,” she answered his gaze and lit a cigarette. She knew he hated smoke.

“Why don’t you take a chance and tell me what I’m supposed to be investigating.”

“You’re the one who hangs from cliffs, not me.”

“All right. For the record, this is the situation you and your superiors have put me into.” He stood and paced the room, thinking for a moment, then speaking loudly for the computer’s benefit.

“Here are the main results of our investigation. Emanuel Shor, Monsignor Peter Chandos, and the Pope himself all died the same day. Shor and Chandos both wore finger rings of the same type with identical inscriptions, acronyms for a Biblical verse: ‘Until He comes whose right it is to reign.’ Emanuel Shor also carried a photo of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem with the same verse scrawled on the back, only in Hebrew.

“Shor entered his own laboratory minutes before his death and removed all trace of a DNA sample belonging to someone named Chandos, a Cohanic sample that shows lineal descent from the high priests of ancient Israel who officiated in the Temple. The DNA of Peter Chandos is of a nearly pure Cohanic strain, and a hair matching that DNA profile was found at the Shor death scene. Finally, we know Shor, his brother and niece, and the Halevys were mixed up with an extremist group that wants to rebuild the Temple.”

Ari looked straight at Kristall, who was staring back at him through a thick screen of smoke; he took a breath.

“So, I believe with reason that a religious fanatic—or a group of fanatics—are engaged in some kind of plot regarding the Temple Mount.”

“With what object?”

“I don’t know, but I believe it’s connected with this ‘lattice,’ whatever it is. Unless you tell me what it is, I’m at a dead stop—and that’s what I want on the record.”

Kristall flicked ash into a paper coffee cup. The briefing room was blue with smoke. She looked up at Ari, considered him for a moment, and then said only, “Peculiar story.”

“Jerusalem is a peculiar place.”

“So you would connect a fairly straightforward technology theft with the assassination of the Pope?” She inhaled deeply from her cigarette. “That’s just bizarre.”

“Bizarre it may be, but straightforward it is not. There’s more.”

Kristall nodded for him to continue.

“Chandos and the Pope died in a remarkable room. It’s called the Sancta Sanctorum, or Holy of Holies, said by Roman Catholics to be the holiest place on earth.”

“Holy of Holies. The Debir? I thought that was a feature of Solomon’s Temple. Where the Ark of the Covenant was kept?”

Ari was surprised she knew this; he had always thought of Kristall as totally nonreligious. Unconsciously, he had gone back to his natural tone of voice. “Apparently, Christians envy the Temple of Jerusalem. They’ve always wanted something like it, where God’s presence dwells…thus, this Roman chapel. It’s perfectly cubical, like the Debir in Solomon’s Temple.

“Anyway, a good deal happened in there that morning. Someone wrapped Chandos’ official red sash around his head—like Jewish priests did anciently with the scapegoat. Someone also collected Chandos’ blood and used it to spatter the chapel altar—the same thing the high priest did in the Jewish Temple on Yom Kippur. And someone stole a valuable art object—a silver icon of Jesus of Nazareth that they believe represents God on earth.”

Kristall shivered at this. She was enough of a Jew to abhor the idea of picturing any man as God. “Someone’s been very busy. I hadn’t heard any of it…but then the Vatican are professionals.”

She inhaled smoke again. “It’s intriguing. Still, the connection between Chandos and our Technion problem is tenuous. A stray eyelash that Shor himself might have dropped; after all, Chandos might have been a client of his lab, and he could recently have been in contact with him. A finger ring any number of people might wear—maybe just a souvenir from some religious shop.”

Ari was looking at her skeptically—it wasn’t like her to dismiss important evidence so readily. She went on:

“No, I can’t tell you about that thing…that object. It’s classified at the highest levels. But I can tell you that its value is beyond estimating, and worth whatever trouble the thieves go to screen themselves. It’s just possible that all this hocus-pocus is meant to distract us long enough so they can get what they want.”

“And what do they want?” Ari gave it back.

“Money. And loads of it. I admit it’s a new angle, but ritual murder might be just the kind of angle they want us to pursue. In the meantime, here’s another angle I want you to pursue.” She beamed a message to him.

Eagle went off the grid at 1107. Last seen westbound Ramla checkpoint.

“Who’s Eagle?”

“That’s our designation for Nasir al-Ayoub. Somewhere outside Ramla, our key suspect disappeared a few hours ago. He could have gone to ground there. I want you to find him.”

“The lattice?”

“You talk about that at your own peril. Our discussion is recorded per your request and regulation. And ended.” The pyramid said goodbye politely and went to sleep.

Angry, Ari turned and left the building. Choking on smoke, he cursed her all the way to his car, then pulled out his GeM and rang Toad.

“You’ve been tracking an Eagle?”

“Eagle. Yes,” Toad replied. “He’s disappeared. Our people lost him at the Ramla checkpoint…found his car in a car park nearby.”

“He must have known we were tailing him.”

“Best to assume that. They’re still looking, but it’s been since before noon.”

“What about satellite?” Ari asked.

“They never got a visual fix on him.”

“Why ‘Eagle’?”

“His name is Nasir—Arabic for eagle.”

“Oh. Kristall wants me to take this one over. Got any ideas?”

“We followed him this morning, on foot through Damascus Gate to his house. After a few minutes he motored out and we traced him electronically this far. None of our taps give any indication of his agenda for today.”

“He wouldn’t be broadcasting it, would he? Any known contacts in Ramla? Women?”

“He is hooked up with a woman, a Dr. Adawi, who lives in Nablus.”

“Wrong direction.” Ari turned and saw something on the driver’s seat of his car. It was a note. He picked it up and scanned it quickly.

“Um…Toad, something’s come up. Keep me in the picture, will you? I’ll ring you later.”

Jaffa Gate, Old City, Jerusalem, 1545h

The last thing Ari expected to see in his life was Tovah Kristall playing the tourist. She stood just inside the Jaffa Gate wearing white capri pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt, sunglasses, and a sailor’s hat. That skin the sun had rarely touched gleamed a fishy yellow. She was arguing with a street vendor over the price of a cheap alabaster chess set that she held with one hand while waving her cigarette with the other.

“Look, I collect chess sets. I could buy one of these from anybody in this town. There are a hundred places. But I chose you. I’ll give you seventy-five euros.”

“You’re killing me. A hundred.”

She looked up at Ari, who now stood smiling next to her. “Can you imagine? This cheap little man. I offered him seventy-five euros…five times what he paid for it.” She turned back. “Keep it. I won’t deal with a pirate.”

Kristall grabbed Ari by the arm and led him away. The vendor followed, moaning “eighty…eighty…”

“Why don’t we go up to the Wall now? I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time,” she said a little too loudly. She headed for the entrance to a staircase nearby, where for a few shekels a tourist could mount the steps and walk about half the circumference of the Old City Wall.

“So now you’re Mata Hari, the famous tourist?” he whispered.

“Come on.”

At the ticket window he waited for her to pay, but she just looked at him; then he pulled his GeM from his pocket and paid both their admissions. Halfway up the steps, she stopped to cough. It was a noise like pebbles and sand in a cement mixer. He put his hand on her arm to steady her.

“It’s all right, Davan.” She shook it off and continued up the stairs.

From the Wall, they could see the roofs of the Old City dominated by the Dome of the Rock, rising into the air like the sun. They walked slowly in the heat along the parapet.

“I didn’t know you were such a chess enthusiast.”

“Everything is chess, Davan.”

He paused. “I’m here, as you asked. You were quick getting here yourself. What other tricks do you do?”

“I like to play spy now and then, don’t you? It reminds me how fun this job is.”

“You like to get out into the field, get in touch with reality.” It was quiet sarcasm.

“My friend, reality is back in that blue hellhole of mine.” It was true; he had rarely seen her outside of the hazy blue-paneled situation room. But she was not convincing; he knew that she liked it there at the center of things.

They stopped in shade beneath a stone tower in a corner of the wall. The blinding gold Dome seemed near enough to touch. She turned and spoke quietly:

“You think there’s some kind of plot concerning the Temple Mount.”

Ari was surprised—he thought she had dismissed the idea. “Yes?”

She gazed again at the Dome. “I knew Shor was connected with a group that wants to build the Temple.” Gnawing silently at her cigarette, she breathed smoke in and out while Ari waited for her to surface again from her thoughts. Then she started speaking, as if to herself.

“This mess is deep. Religious crazies. An itinerant Palestinian contractor. And a new kind of weapon…” She caught herself and looked at Ari. “I couldn’t, or rather didn’t want to, get into this after you forced me to record our conversation. In certain circles, it’s best to dismiss this sort of thing.”

She crushed her cigarette on the ground.

“Any threat to all that Vatican over there I take seriously,” she said, pointing to the Temple Mount. “I take it very, very seriously. These people who want to rebuild Solomon’s Temple—they are the worst enemies we have.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, Davan, no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. Look at it.” She gazed again at the Dome. “The Mosque of Omar. Built thirteen centuries ago on the rock where Mohammed went up to Heaven. Go back thirteen centuries before that, and the Temple of Solomon stood on the same spot. Built on the rock where Jacob ben-Isaac laid his head and announced, Surely this is the House of God.”

Again, Ari was startled at the things the irreligious Kristall knew about religion.

“Obviously, to build the Temple, you have to remove the Dome. And that brings catastrophe. The whole Muslim world would rise up like one person—one very angry person—and they’re no longer the pitiful army our grandfathers routed sixty years ago. For decades they’ve looked for any excuse they can find to ‘eradicate the Zionist Entity.’ They mean it, Davan. I’ve looked in their faces.

“So the very last thing we want is a religious paranoid-delusional blowing up the Dome of the Rock to make way for some fantasy of a Temple. It’s been tried before. One of my first cases. A man named Solomon Barda. A lunatic, an Israeli who lived in the States for a while, joined some mad cult, and came back here to start his own religion. A bizarre concoction of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. He had splendid success—three followers as crazy as he was—who believed they could coax the Messiah down from Heaven by destroying the Dome. They had got hold of enough dynamite and C-4 and Semtex to turn it into rubble.”

“What happened?” Ari asked.

“It was forty years ago. No, more than that.” Kristall’s voice had hardened. “We caught them in the act. They all went to prison. All but one…the one who escaped.

“And that’s why we have paid to put up the best 24-hour security system on the planet around that Muslim shrine. ‘Flaming Sword.’ No one, nothing gets through it undetected. Weapons, explosives easily spotted. But a missile—that’s something else. In August, we came awfully close to disaster. If the Synagogue hadn’t burned…”

She trailed off again.

“If you think my idea is so laughable, why are you going on like this?” he asked her.

“No one’s laughing, Davan. I brought you out here to talk it through with you because no one else wants to talk about it. Not the Prime Minister, not anyone. They all think we’re invincible. I told him, there are two billion Muslims in the world, and the number is rising fast. There are five million Jews in this country, and the number is going down.”

Ari interrupted her. “What’s the new weapon?”

She was quiet for a moment, but took a rattling breath and went on as if she hadn’t heard him. He knew then he would get no answer.

“To make things worse, there are all these fringe groups who are tired of waiting for the Messiah to come. They all believe the Temple has to be built first, so they want to speed things up a bit. To give God a nudge and force the Almighty’s hand by blowing up the Dome.”

“I’ve heard about all that. Do you think this Mishmar of Emanuel Shor’s is involved in that sort of thing?”

“I’m not concerned about them. We’ve been watching them for years. As for Dr. Shor…well, never mind. They’re not on my mind right now. It’s this Palestinian, this Ayoub.”

Ari frowned. “Why would a Muslim want to destroy the Dome?”

“Doesn’t it occur to you that the best way to push Israel into the sea would be to get the Muslim world angry enough to attack us in force? What would motivate the combined armies and air forces of twenty Islamic countries to come at us all at once? What kind of an event might prompt ten million Muslim boys to wade through oceans of their own blood to get at us? The destruction of this Dome would do that.

“Davan, unlike you, I’m not a sabra. I wasn’t born in this country. I didn’t grow up with Hebrew on TV in a nice West Jerusalem neighborhood. I grew up in Ukraine, where we were zhids—the cause of everybody’s problems. Everything bad in life was because of the zhids. You don’t get paid enough? It’s the zhids’ fault. You lost your job? The zhids took it. Our neighbors hated us.”

Ari had never heard Kristall talk like this.

“At school, in the marketplace…it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what they said or even did. It was how they looked at me. Sometimes I wished they would say something to me. I dreamed they would, so I could smash their faces.

“When my family wanted to leave, the government laid an ‘emigration tax’ on us, supposedly to get back the money they had spent ‘educating’ us. It took everything we had, but we left for eretz Israel, and for a while it did feel like a new world.

“It didn’t take me long to find out that nothing had changed. We were still surrounded.”

The air was pale with heat and the exhaust of the streets, the reflection of the dimming sun spreading like a reddish stain over the Dome. Below the Wall, the evening auto traffic was pressed into a noisy, slow-moving wedge. Ari and Kristall looked out over the Old City, its trees and dusty roofs quiet in contrast with the world outside the Wall. Kristall absently pulled out a cigarette, looked at it, and threw it back in her bag.

“I want you to take responsibility for this Ayoub,” she said. “The Eagle is yours.”

At that moment, her GeM sounded from the bag. “What is it?” she snapped a tiny receiver into her ear and then was listening intently. Somewhere, over the noise of the traffic, a peacock gave a faint call. At last she rang off and looked up at Ari.

“You were saying something earlier about ‘ritual murder?’ ”

“If I remember right, you used that expression, not I.”

“How did the Pope die?” she asked. “And Shor?”

“Commando-style—one shot to the head, three to the chest on a horizontal axis.”

“The ceremony continues. You have two more. Died the same way, this afternoon. In an office tower in Tel Aviv.

“Who?”

“Shimon Tempelman and Catriel Levine.”

French Room of the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, Texas, 1200h

Four playful cherubs danced down from a blue heaven trailing a tinselwork of flowers. The ceilings and walls, bright and mellow at once, flowed with ribbons of colored light. Through an arch of gilded plaster, a window revealed a row of bank buildings across the street, but softened the traffic sounds from the abyss below.

“Roast venison with rosemary potatoes.” Pastor Bob Jonas grinned decisively at the waiter, and then looked triumphantly around the table. “Six-shooter coffee with that,” he added in a loud whisper.

“I’ll have whatever Chef says,” Lambert Sable dismissed the waiter.

“Yes, Mr. Sable,” the waiter bobbed. “I’m sure he’ll want to greet you himself.”

“Tell him not to bother.”

There was a tricky silence. Then Pastor Bob laughed. “Not very often a servant of the Lord gets to eat in a place like this. Might as well leverage the opportunity.”

“You mean, to share a table with sinners?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t see anything wrong with eating lunch with the Dallas Morning News. Jesus ate with the publicans and the sinners.”

“Mr. Sable,” the reporter asked, “we’ve been trying to get an interview with you for a long time about your support for Pastor Bob here. What made you agree to it now?”

In his inelegant suit, Sable looked utterly out of place in the restaurant. Nothing fit him quite right. His clothes were expensive, but the shapeless body couldn’t fill them. He had never finished high school, a Marine at eighteen, a software billionaire at forty, never quite sure what other people were about. Two wives were unaccountably gone; his children errant and immersed somewhere in Las Vegas, addicted to this and that. But his mother had raised him on the Bible; it was the one thing he counted on. And now, he was hopeful, the long confusion of his life was over.

“Because people need to be warned. My board wanted me to stay away from you—you’ll understand why—but there’re only a few days left, and I’ve got a burden for all these people.” He gestured around the room.

The reporter took stock of the other guests, mostly women branded with the Neiman-Marcus logo and murmuring over champagne and salads of tiny, expensive greens. She turned back to Sable.

“You’re quite convinced, then.”

“Oh, yes, the winding-up scene is only hours away now.” The reporter was an attractive woman. Sable cursed his sweating habit; he felt his scalp dripping and dabbed it with his napkin. “So I said, to heck with the board, you media folks can help us get the word out before it’s too damn late.”

“Maybe you can help me understand why you feel this way.”

“That’s why I asked Pastor Bob to join us,” Sable said anxiously. “He’s got it all figured out. He can explain it a lot better than I can.”

The pastor crossed her hand with his. “First of all, Olive, are you saved? Are you a Christian?”

“I’m Jewish.”

Pastor Bob grinned at Sable. “We got work to do with this young lady, Lam.”

The reporter explained. “The News sent me because they think I can take a more objective approach to this story. Maybe you could start from the beginning, just for me.”

“From the beginning?” Pastor Bob glanced up at the pink cherubs overhead and appeared to say a little prayer. “Okay. Here goes. The Bible says that before the end of time, ‘the Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.’ We call this the Rapture of the Church.”

“So all the Christians will, what, fly away? Rise up into the sky?”

“Something like that. All we know is that one moment you’ll see us, and the next we’ll be gone.”

“Leaving people like me—Jews, non-Christians, nonbelievers—behind?”

“That’s right. What follows will be seven years of tribulation. The devil will rule the earth, and God will pour out his wrath until he makes an end of all wickedness. At that point he’ll establish his kingdom finally and forever.”

“But how do you know this Rapture will take place on Monday?”

Pastor Bob put his palms together as if in prayer. “Simple mathematics. The Jews measured time in jubilees—periods of fifty years. The earth will only last six thousand years, or 120 jubilees. According to the ancient rabbis, the 120th jubilee will mark the final deliverance from all sin; now, Monday is the Jewish day of atonement and also the end of the 120th jubilee.”

“But the earth is billions of years old. Where do you get this notion of six thousand years?”

“My dear, the Bible says the earth is only six thousand years old, and that’s good enough for me. Just add up the genealogies in the Bible—it’s as simple as that. Now the Lord doesn’t want his saints to suffer through the seven years of tribulation, so up we go. Mr. Lambert Sable here and I are flying all the folks who want to go to Jerusalem to meet the Lord personally on Monday.”

“So, what becomes of the people who are left behind?”

Pastor Bob stopped smiling and put both hands flat on the table as if he were going to push himself up. “Bible prophecies couldn’t be clearer about that, ma’am—Daniel, Joel, Zechariah, Malachi, John the Revelator. And you need to hear it because it involves you and your people. After the Christians are gone, the Jews will come together at last and build the Third Temple right where the Dome of the Rock is in Jerusalem.

“This will infuriate the Muslims, who surround Israel on all four sides. The demolition of that Dome and the rebuilding of the Temple will ignite the greatest war the world has ever seen. Millions of Muslims will converge on Jerusalem, slaughtering every Jew they can find until the city is nothing but a cup of Jewish blood. It’ll make the Holocaust pale by comparison.

“Only then, when his own crucifixion at the hands of the Jews is avenged, will Jesus Christ make his final appearance in glory.”

After a difficult silence, the reporter turned to Sable. “So…you’re buying this? And you’ve actually willed all of your property to…um…”

“I call it the Left-Behind Foundation,” Sable answered. “It’s to fund the evangelizing of all the people left in the world after the Rapture.”

“So there is some hope for us?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. Many people will be saved during the Tribulation; I want my assets to go into helping them.” Sable was eager.

“But it’d be oh, so much better for you not to have to face the Tribulation, dear lady. You need to come with us, Olive. You really do,” Pastor Bob said, reaching across the table for her hands. She drew back.

The Pastor beamed at her and looked at his watch. “You’ve got about eighty hours to change your mind.” Then he saw the waiter approaching and dropped his napkin in his lap. “And here comes my venison with rosemary potatoes.”

Near the White Tower, Ramla, Israel, 2330h

“And certainly We created man of the essence of clay… Then We made the seed a clot… Then We made the clot a lump of flesh.”

The green robes of the circle of brothers had long since dimmed into undifferentiated black. The only light came from a pale lamp the white-robed Sheikh used to read by, and the other three witnesses sat, all in white, at the remaining compass points. The sword lay on its tapestry on the ground before the Sheikh, who chanted from the book propped on his lap, stopping after every phrase, aching for breath.

“As for those who led the way, the first muhajirun… 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.”

A barefoot young initiate, all in black, stood in the center of the circle. The Sheikh paused while the initiate cupped his hands in a fountain. He washed his hands, face, and feet, breathed in the water and washed his mouth. Then the circle of men arose to begin the night prayer.

As the prayers closed, the initiate remained on his knees, hands spread before him as if holding an offering of incense or cupping the light from the Tower. The Sheikh continued:

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

One of the witnesses stood and opened a vial of olive oil, then slowly poured the oil over the head of the young man, who looked up at the sky, at the faint golden light reflected on the remains of the Tower, and shook his rich, wet, black hair. “You are anointed as the Black Stone is anointed, the cornerstone which fell from the garden of Heaven.”

“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?’ …

“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 and closed his eyes, his head surrounded with the stalks of white star flowers. It was not a large garden, but a very old one, set with low walls and flagstones, watched over by the medieval ruin of the White Tower and hemmed in by an olive grove. A single lemon tree near the fountain was about to bloom; the hot night had allowed a limp breeze with a trace of lemon flower.

The Sheikh sat up, rubbed his eyes, 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.”

Panting, the old man leaned forward and picked up the scimitar. The fiery lightning ran the length of the blade. He elevated the sword in both hands and went on reading:

“This is the Verse of the Sword—When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Hold them, besiege them, lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and alms, let them go. God is forgiving and merciful…

“How can there be a covenant between idolaters and God and His Apostle, except those with whom you made an agreement at the sacred mosque? So as long as they are true to you, be true to them; surely God loves those who carefully do their duty… God will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths.”

The initiate bowed to the Sheikh, took up the sword in its tapestry, and then returned it to the Sheikh’s outstretched hands.

“The sword is the symbol of the covenant you make on this gathering day to do your duty. Do you accept?”

The young man nodded, and the three witnesses stood and approached him. They unfolded a long white robe and dressed him in it and put a white turban on his head. The old man then laid over the robe an ancient green stole and said in a stern voice, “We invest you with the khirqa, the robe God gave Adam in the Garden of Eden. Wear it so you may find the sweetness of faith. We bind your head with the royal turban. Wear it as a crown in token of your throne and kingdom. Its virtue will accompany you to your grave.”

Then the Sheikh set down the sword and toiled to his feet with the help of two brothers at his side. He took the initiate by his right hand. “This is the bayat, the taking of hands—whosoever gives his allegiance to this band of brothers gives it to God Himself. The Prophet established this order when he allowed his most trusted followers, the first muhajirun, to take his hand and commit themselves to infinite loyalty to God and His Messenger. It is the link in the chain that connects you to the light of the Prophet, peace be upon him. It connects you to the chain of all the prophets, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.”

He enfolded the young man in his arms, touching him with the hem of his own robe, saying, “Those who are keepers of their covenants and who keep a guard on their prayers—these are they who are the heirs, who shall inherit the Paradise.”

“You are the true Son of the Eagle,” he whispered in his ear. “May you be the last.”