Ishmael Covenant

by Terry Brennan

  US Ambassador’s Residence, Tel Aviv

  July 19, 5:56 p.m.

  When the twelfth empty box was tossed into a corner, Parker realized she was hungry. She was also tense, frustrated, and anxious—jumpy because of that package in her closet and fearful for her father. She stretched her back and rotated her shoulders, trying to reduce the strain.

  I need to get out of here for a while.

  She looked in the mirror. Her short, dark hair slightly mussed, she ran her fingers through it. That’s presentable. After emptying the second moving box, she had changed into old jeans and a Compassion International T-shirt. Probably not the outfit for an official function, but she needed some fresh air. The outdoor market that filled the open space of the Shmu’el Tamir Garden was only a few blocks from the residence. She had discovered a vendor who prepared the most delicious pita, filled with homemade hummus and fresh Jerusalem salad.

  She went into her closet for the green cardigan sweater to cover most of the T-shirt and a scarf for her hair. Her mouth was already savoring the treat to come. Pulling on the sweater, her eyes caught sight of the satchel on the upper shelf. She stopped.

  No … I promised Dad.

  She pushed her arm through the sleeve and reached for the scarf hanging on a hook … her eyes glued to the leather satchel.

  Haisha Golden was distraught. No, she was frantic. What to do? It was nearly six o’clock, and she still hadn’t finished cleaning the ambassador’s private quarters at the residence. One day! In Israel he is one day, and I don’t get my work done. My job is kaput!

  Even if the sun was up, the sky was blue, and she had no bills to pay, Haisha would worry. Her mother said she was born with a scowl on her face and doubt in her heart. This was her fate. Someone had to worry.

  Two decades she had worked at the ambassador’s residence, first as a dishwasher. Worry begat diligence, and Haisha earned respect and greater responsibility. Which begat more worry. Only forty-two years of age, her hair was gray trending to white, her shoulders fixed in a permanent droop, the creases on her brow like dry wadis in the Negev.

  As a rule, unless requested, the housekeeping staff did not enter the ambassador’s private quarters if the ambassador or any of his family were still there. So for the third time, Haisha mopped the floor of the large, main reception room, hoping that Mrs. Parker would find things to do in another part of the building. Or take a nap on the terrace. Anything. She was already an hour late on her schedule and still had two rooms to finish.

  Haisha was debating whether the floor needed a fourth cleaning when one of the other servants found her.

  “Mrs. Parker has gone out. She’s headed to the open market at the Tamir Garden.”

  Before the woman’s words were completely out of her mouth, Haisha had secured the half-empty bucket onto the bottom of her housekeeping cart, stacked the mop next to her brooms, and was pushing the cart toward the guarded entrance to the ambassador’s wing. No time to waste.

  The guards waved Haisha through without delay, and she directly entered Mrs. Parker’s bedroom suite. Her progress was impeded by stalagmites of moving boxes that had sprouted up in the middle of the bedroom from the stacks that once filled the closet to her right. Now she was panicked. How could she clean in this mess?

  Haisha might worry, but she was diligent. And she hatched a plan.

  Moving with determined desperation, she broke down flat the dozen empty boxes that were scattered around the room. She forged a path through the boxes that remained in the right closet and stashed the flat, empty boxes along a wall in the back.

  In order to clean the bedroom, Haisha needed to get these moving boxes out of the way. Wondering if the stacks of boxes remaining in the bedroom were in a particular order, Haisha resolved to move them into the closet in roughly the same manner that they now sat in the bedroom. Which meant building the boxes already in the closet into higher stacks so she could make room in the closet for the ones in the bedroom. And time was escaping like air from a punctured balloon.

  Her shoulders barked in pain as she lifted box upon box to make room in the closet, building stacks as high as her head. Haisha’s tired and aching muscles rebelled as she pushed her body faster and faster. She still had the rooms to clean.

  She hefted a heavy box and rested it against her collarbone. There was room for one more. She pushed, the weight shifted, her left shoulder gave way and the box tipped, smacking against the shelf that ran high along the closet’s walls. If Haisha hadn’t ducked under the precarious box to steady it, the satchel that fell from the shelf would have hit her directly in the head instead of crashing into another stack of boxes and then thudding onto the quarry tile floor of the closet. “Aaiieee … what a meshuggana!”

  Determined, Haisha pushed once more against the box held up by her palms and shoved it into the space beneath the shelf. Then she turned to pick up the bag that fell from the shelf.

  The bag had sprung its latch in the fall and a wooden case joined it on the floor. One corner of the wooden case was flattened. It lay on its side, its lid more than half opened, bits of purple cloth sticking out, something inside resting against the floor. A frightening vision of unemployment flashed through Haisha’s mind, of the poverty her dismissal would cause, her mother opening an empty refrigerator, unpaid bills piled on the counter.

  Stooping down, she pushed her hand under the wooden case and felt a metal surface. She fished around with her fingers, found a corner to the metal surface—warm against her flesh—and pushed it back into the wooden box. She set the wooden box onto the floor, closed its lid tightly and then shoved the wooden box back inside the open leather satchel that lay to her right.

  Unsteady on her feet, fearful of another avalanche from the high shelf, Haisha reached into the bedroom, a frigid current of pain running across her shoulders, and pulled a straight-backed chair into the closet. Standing on the chair, Haisha hefted the satchel back onto the closet’s shelf. She got light-headed and shivered as if a glacier had replaced her blood. She pushed the satchel fully onto the shelf and reached for the back of the chair to steady herself. A bolt of pain shot from her left temple to her right temple. Her mouth opened to scream when an unseen hand grabbed her heart and squeezed it like jelly.

  Haisha was dead before her body hit the floor. Blood flowed from her eyes and her gray hair drifted away from her body. She had no more worries.

  15

  Ankara

  July 19, 6:00 p.m.

  The Turk exited the car, his specter-like aide drifting in his wake, and entered the narrow, darkened alley in the Old City of Ankara. Stone walls, the back ends of houses that faced the flanking streets, rose out of sight on both sides of the alley. No windows faced this alley, and the two doors that gave way into it were blocked with heavy wooden barrels. There would be no unwelcome guests at this meeting.

  Before he reached the end of the alley, the Turk heard his aide come close.

  “Master … a call for you.”

  Assan held out a mobile phone toward the Turk, who answered. “Yes?”

  “The woman has left the residence … alone, empty-handed.”

  An interesting development. “Any word from Cerkis?”

  “No, Master, not since they got on the highway.”

  “Very well. Gather the other disciples with you. Take her,” said the Turk. “Quickly and quietly. Take her to the warehouse Cerkis uses. Perhaps the daughter is of more worth to the ambassador than the message or the box. Do it … now.”

  Handing the phone back to his aide, the Turk noticed that a large, heavy wooden door with huge metal hinges was open at the end of the alley, casting a sallow dusk onto the cobblestones. A silent sentinel held the door open. The Turk and his aide entered a tight corridor which culminated in steps rising into blackness beyond. The Turk pulled together the lapels of the long, loose coat he wore over the traditional baggy trousers and ascended each step with care, the pungent aroma of cinnamon and cardamom revealing the e
xistence of a nearby spice merchant.

  Another silent servant waited at the top of the stairs, a small oil lamp in his hand. With neither word nor gesture, he lit their way down another corridor. Outside the realm of the oil lamp, the rest of the corridor was impenetrable darkness. Only their steps pilfered the silence.

  The servant came to a halt abreast a two-piece, dark wooden door. He knocked once, then stepped back. The wooden door opened in the middle and swung back on both sides, revealing a young woman in the traditional Turkish dress of a tesettür, a head scarf and light cover-all robe. Remnants of the woman’s beauty remained, but it was ruined by a livid scar that started along the right side of her nose and extended down past her lips and over her chin to the underside of her neck. She bowed and gestured the Turk into the room.

  Small oil lamps hung from the walls, provoking the dark but not dismissing it. Incense burned somewhere, masking the acrid smoke that still lifted from the hookah on a small round table on the right side of the room. Along the right wall, reclining on a cushioned divan, was his host.

  The Turk walked to a cushioned chair that faced the divan and lowered himself into it without a sound. The two men relaxed, measuring each other through the smoke-filled twilight in the room.

  The Turk waited. He knew that, in any negotiation, the one who spoke first, the one who broke the silence, would lose. He waited. Off in a corner, someone—probably the woman—faintly coaxed a song of lament from the strings of a zither. The Turk waited.

  “It is good to see you here once again,” said his host. “It’s so rare that we have an opportunity to speak like this, in private.”

  “There is the woman,” said the Turk.

  “She is a mute,” said his host. “She has no tongue. Only her music speaks for her.”

  “She can write what she can hear.”

  “Then speak softly, my friend.”

  The Turk drew the folds of his coat closer around him. I shall not suffer this fool much longer. “Our shipment of arms to the Kurdish fighters arrived without incident.” The Turk’s voice was the slither of a whisper. “The second delivery of arms, and the material necessary to transport the bombs, is on its way to Colonel Matoush. Medir, the arms dealer, fulfilled his promises. Sadly for him, Medir did not return to his home.”

  Over the last eight decades, ever since the box had been carried to Istanbul for safekeeping, the Turk had pursued his singular purpose with the unrelenting determination of a starving jungle cat, seducing three earlier power seekers with the fulfilled promise of limitless wealth. Still, he had gotten no closer to securing—or destroying—the box or procuring the key to dismantle the prophetic promises of the book. He had been frustrated in Turkey just as he had been frustrated in Germany before the second war. He was a brown shirt then, known as the Prussian. In 1938, he disappeared from Konigsberg like a fog on the wind, reborn in Istanbul and known only as the Turk.

  His host was only the latest pawn in the Turk’s plan, a pawn who dreamed himself a king. But a pawn who became more valuable when the Lithuanian’s first message was revealed.

  Out of necessity, the Turk remained invisible as his host grew in political power and prominence in Turkey. Since the early days of the so-called Arab Spring, when the contagion of rebellion and chaos first exploded into the Muslim world, the Turk had cultivated this relationship as if it were the rarest flower—watered with limitless wealth, fed with flattery and dreams of dominance—as he used to his advantage the anarchy that swept through so much of the Arab world.

  Some, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, saw the Arab Spring as an opportunity to seize power in a land where they had been hunted as outlaws and forced to survive in hiding for decades. They were but a flame in a breeze, bright but incompetent and easily extinguished. Others were contentious and amorphous militias, roving bands of lawless marauders who, as in Libya, were handed a country without a functioning government and watched it descend into chaos.

  And then there was Zarqawi. A Jordanian hoodlum, originally named Ahmad al-Khalayleh, he became radicalized during religious instruction in an Amman mosque, spent many years in Jordanian prisons, emerging as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a zealous convert to jihadism. He joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan early in the new century and a few years later surfaced in Baghdad as leader of an aggressive cancer called al-Qaeda in Iraq that preached an Islamic fanaticism that frightened even Muslim leaders. Following Zarqawi’s assassination-by-drone, al-Qaeda in Iraq was reborn in the power vacuum of the Syrian civil war as the Islamic State.

  In reality, ISIS now ruled in the Middle East. Its self-proclaimed caliphate not only encompassed a land mass virtually erasing the border between Syria and Iraq, but it was also the single most dominant factor in the geopolitical existence of every Middle Eastern nation. Every Muslim nation lived in fear of what ISIS represented—allegiance not to a nation, but to a narrowly defined, apostate sect of Islam that controlled every aspect of life and brought it into line with a medieval and legalistic ideology celebrating heinous violence as its preferred method of evangelism.

  This was not the Islam served by either the Turk or his host. Neither rebellion nor anarchy was the Turk’s anticipated avenue to power. He was a ruthless adherent to the violence of jihad, but his self-serving zeal for the ascendancy of Islam emanated from him more than earthly ambition.

  The Turk was not only a diligent scholar of the Koran, but he also seriously studied the writings of the other two great religions birthed from the loins of Abraham, the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Bible. Two things were true about all three scriptural texts. Each contained a detailed, similar pronouncement on the last days of this earthly realm—a short-lived, world-wide age of peace and prosperity. But each of the three sacred books predicted a culmination of this peaceful age with differences that were striking and incompatible. Only one would be correct.

  In the Hebrew Tanakh—the compilation of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings—the Turk had learned that the end-of-time scenario would be inaugurated by the arrival of the much-prophesied Messiah, a Jewish king who would rule the entire earth, with Jerusalem as his capital. This Messiah-King would employ his divine authority and power to end all disease, bring bountiful agricultural harvests to the entire earth, and pacify all animals. Israel would be restored to its rightful prominence above all nations of the world with the Messiah-King ruling over a world united into one confederation that poured prosperity into Israel, ending all war.

  The Christian Bible incorporated these same Jewish writings as the Old Testament and introduced an additional history called the New Testament. In this new text, Jesus Christ, the Nazarene prophet, was crucified by the Romans. From the Turk’s study, Christians naively believed this Christ was resurrected to life after being dead for three days and was bodily lifted from this earth to sit, in human form, at the right hand of God. This New Testament predicted Jesus would one day return to earth in his human form as a warrior-king. In a climactic battle on the plains of Meggido, Christ’s heavenly armies would destroy the armies of the world and usher in a millennium of peace on earth. A new, perfect Jerusalem would descend from heaven and replace its earthly predecessor. In a final judgment of all humanity throughout all history, the just would live in perfected bodies on a perfected earth for all eternity. And those who did not swear allegiance to the Nazarene would be condemned to an eternity in a blazing torture called hell.

  In contrast, the sacred scripture of Islam, the Koran that the Turk and his host revered and honored, contained the words actually spoken by the prophet Muhammad, written down and organized into suras, or chapters, after his death. The Koran contained many of the same people and events as the Jewish and Christian Scripture, but established Muhammad as the last and greatest prophet. Supporting the Koran were Hadiths, written traditions of Muhammad, and Sunna, the path and practices of Muhammad. Islamic scripture predicted the coming of the Mahdi, the final and greatest caliph, who would reign for seven years over a golden age of
universal peace and prosperity under Islamic Sharia law, prior to the final judgment.

  Each religion believed that divine intervention would inaugurate the last days of humankind.

  But only the followers of Islam believed their actions in this current world could hasten the coming of the Mahdi. What consumed the Turk, and intrigued his host, was a simple belief: that their intervention in this world could thwart all possibility for the emergence of a Judeo-Christian Messiah. They had come to a conclusion. If they could impede the fulfillment of any one Judeo-Christian prophecy, they would prevent the realization of all Messianic prophecy.

  If they could manipulate the story of Scripture, they could manufacture its conclusion to fit their own ends. The Turk was convinced and committed. He could, and he would, change the Bible.

  When the fulfillment of prophecy was destroyed, first would emerge a transcontinental Islamic caliphate with one ruler—one of the men in this room, but not his host, in spite of the lofty position he currently held.

  But out of that caliphate would arise a ruler for whom the Turk was only a messenger. A ruler—the One—who would reign over a worldwide empire unhindered by the empty promises of a book that no longer exerted any power.

  Certainly to achieve this dream, Israel must be obliterated, the West infiltrated and overthrown. But ISIS and its dream of caliphate must also be destroyed, the Persians prevented from rising once again on the crest of wanton nuclear ransom, and the once indolent Arabs prohibited from joining the limited fraternity of nuclear nations.

  No, the nuclear fraternity would have a new member, but not those pleasure-sated Saudis. The Turk and his host were committed to an emerging plot that—if successful—would ensure a new Ottoman Empire once again ruling from the Indus Valley through the underbelly of Europe to the very gates of Rome, Paris, and Berlin. And the Turk had the Americans to thank for providing the tools and the opportunity for the Ottoman Empire to rise once again.