by Mark Alpert
As David and Monique entered the room, the students fell silent. They stared at Monique in particular, their mouths wide open, ready to start shouting imprecations. But the rabbi seemed neither shocked nor outraged by her presence. Smiling at the pair of students who’d escorted them into the study hall, the Rav said something in Hebrew. The bigger student answered, and in the midst of his rapid Hebrew sentences David heard the words “FBI” and “Olam ben Z’man.”
The old man stopped smiling. He rose to his feet and gave David a desperate look. “What is it?” he asked. His face had paled. “What happened to Olam?”
David stepped forward. “Is there a place where we can talk privately, Mr. Kavner?”
“Ach! I knew it!” The rabbi grimaced as if in pain. He balled his right hand into a fist and smacked it against his forehead. “I knew something terrible would happen! I warned him so many times!”
“Please, Mr. Kavner.” Monique pointed to a door at the other end of the study hall. “Is that your office?”
“Yes, yes.” The Rav lowered his fist. Then he slowly turned around and walked toward the door.
They followed him into a windowless cubbyhole with an old wooden desk and tall stacks of books piled against the walls. While the rabbi settled into the chair behind the desk, David closed the office door. There were two chairs with torn seat covers in front of the desk. Monique sat down in one of them, but David remained standing. “We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Kavner,” he started. “And we—”
“Just tell me one thing,” the rabbi interrupted. He slumped low in his chair, looking bereft. “Is Olam dead?”
David shook his head. “We have no evidence that he’s been injured or killed, but—”
“Baruch HaShem!” the Rav sang out, raising his hands in the air and looking up at the ceiling. “Blessed is the Eternal!”
“But we believe he’s in danger, so we need to find him as soon as possible. Do you have any idea where he could be?”
The rabbi frowned. “If I knew where Olam was, do you think I’d be sick with worry like this? He left the yeshiva on Tuesday night and we haven’t heard from him since.” The Rav sat a little straighter in his chair. “What kind of danger is he in? And why are you Americans here and not the Israeli police?”
Monique gave him an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Rabbi, we’ll answer all your questions in a minute, okay? We just need to get our bearings first. Is Olam a student at this yeshiva?”
“Yes, yes. In fact, he’s my most brilliant student. He’s older than the others and his studies are more advanced, but he lives in the dormitory upstairs and participates in all the sacred work we do.”
“Sacred work?”
“Yes, we’re preparing Jerusalem for the Messiah.” The Rav spread his arms wide, gesturing at the walls of his cramped office. “That’s why we bought this building and turned it into a house of prayer and study. The Palestinians say we’re trying to drive them out of the Old City, but that’s a lie. The truth is, we don’t care about the Palestinians. We care only about God.”
David could tell from the look on Monique’s face that she was struggling not to roll her eyes. “Let’s get back to Olam,” she said. “How long have you known him?”
“Let me think.” The Rav bit his lower lip and stared at the ceiling again. “Yes, it was four years ago. Olam heard about our sacred work at Beit Shalom and came to see me. We had a nice chat, and a few weeks later he began his studies here.”
“You said he’s older than your other students?”
“Yes, he’s in his fifties. Olam came here after a personal tragedy, you see. You remember the war in Lebanon a few years ago? When we fought the Hezbollah murderers who fired their rockets across our border?”
Monique nodded. “Yes, I remember.”
“Many young Israeli soldiers were killed. Olam’s son was one of them.” The Rav shook his head. “But the Eternal works in mysterious ways. Sometimes a tragedy like this can draw people closer to Him. And that’s what happened to Olam. He left his home and his job and went searching for God.”
“What was his job? Before he came here, I mean?”
“He was a scientist at Hebrew University, an expert on computers. And he had some connections in the Israeli government, too. He knew people high up in the army and the air force. He didn’t like to talk about it much, but he told me a few stories.”
David felt a surge of adrenaline. They were on the right track. Bennett had told them that Olam ben Z’man had identified himself as a computer scientist in the phone messages he’d left for Jacob Steele. The connections to the Israeli government also made sense. Olam would’ve needed some high-level help to make sure that his fiber-optic line didn’t appear on the phone company’s maps.
“Maybe you can help us with something, Mr. Kavner,” David said. “We’ve already checked the records at Hebrew University. No one by the name of Olam ben Z’man has ever been associated with the school. Is that his birth name?”
The rabbi shook his head. “Oh no! His real name is Loebman. Or maybe Loehmann? It’s one of the two. Or something similar.”
Monique looked askance. “You don’t know his real name?”
“We never call him by that name in the yeshiva. We call him Olam ben Z’man because that’s the sacred name he took when he began studying Kabbalah.” He leaned across his desk, staring intently at Monique. “I assume you’ve heard of Kabbalah? It’s very popular in America, I hear.”
She didn’t answer. Her brow was creased. She was probably thinking the same thing David was. With the information they had now, they could figure out Olam ben Z’man’s real name. All they had to do was look for a former professor in Hebrew University’s computer science department whose son had died in Lebanon.
Rav Kavner turned to David. “What about you? Do you know about Kabbalah? Many people in America think they do, but what they know is just nonsense. They think Kabbalah is some kind of Jewish cult, with secret codes and other foolishness.”
As it happened, David knew a few things about Kabbalah. He’d studied the subject at Columbia after he quit the physics program and started pursuing his Ph.D. in the history of science. He’d taken a course called History of Science in the Middle Ages, and Kabbalah was one of the topics they’d covered. “It’s a branch of medieval Jewish philosophy,” he said. “The Kabbalists were trying to explain the fundamental nature of the universe. They wanted to understand how an infinite, eternal God could create a finite, mortal world.”
The rabbi stared at him for several seconds, unblinking. Then he smiled. “Excellent! An American who actually knows something about Kabbalah!” He pointed a crooked finger at David. “But let me give you a little test. Do you know what Ein Sof is? And the Sephirot?”
David searched his memory. He’d enjoyed the course on medieval science, so he remembered the subject fairly well. “Ein Sof is Hebrew for ‘Without End.’ It refers to the infinite, unknowable God. The Sephirot are the emanations of God that were used to create the knowable world. I think the idea is that God had to break Himself up into different aspects to manifest Himself in the physical universe.”
“That’s close but not exactly right. Sephirot doesn’t mean ‘emanations.’ It means ‘enumerations.’ Like counting, see?” The Rav held out his hands, splaying the fingers. “There are ten Sephirot and they’re arranged in a pattern called Etz HaChayim, the Tree of Life. This pattern has three pillars and twenty-two paths between the Sephirot, which correspond to the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. You see?”
David didn’t. The Rav had lost him. He opened his mouth, intending to steer the conversation back to Olam ben Z’man, but Monique beat him to it. “Rabbi, could we get back to something you said before? You said you’d warned Olam that something terrible would happen. What did you mean by that?”
The Rav let out a sigh. His face turned sober. “The terrible thing came from Olam’s studies of the Kabbalah. You see, there are certain Kabbalistic teac
hings that can be misunderstood. For this reason many rabbis won’t teach Kabbalah to anyone under the age of forty. Olam was over that age and brilliant besides, so I accepted him as my student. But he was too brilliant for his own good. After he read all the Kabbalistic books he could find, he came up with some ideas of his own, and those ideas led him into trouble.”
“What ideas?”
“Ach, it’s hard to explain.” The rabbi shook his head. “Olam’s ideas didn’t come from the traditional books or commentaries. They came from science, his work with computers. He tried to combine his scientific theories with the principles of Kabbalah. But I know nothing about computers. When Olam talked about his ideas, they made no sense to me, and I told him so. So he found someone else to talk to, another scientist he was friendly with.”
“Someone at Hebrew University?”
“No, it was someone in America. At a university in Maryland.”
David felt another surge of adrenaline. The rabbi was talking about Jacob Steele. “Mr. Kavner, could you try to remember what Olam said about his ideas? Just tell us the words he used, even if they don’t make any sense to you.”
The rabbi looked at the ceiling again. After a few seconds he closed his eyes, but his head remained in the same position, tilted backward. “He kept using the word meyda. In English it means ‘information.’ He kept telling me, over and over, ‘The universe is information.’ I asked him, ‘What do you mean by this?’ and he started talking about particles and forces of nature, and it was all scientific gibberish that had nothing to do with Kabbalah. And so I said to him. ‘Olam, you’re wrong. The universe is God.’ And he said, ‘Then information is God, because everything in the universe is composed of information.’” The Rav opened his eyes. “Now tell me, was I wrong? How was I supposed to make any sense of this?”
Monique stood up and advanced to the edge of the rabbi’s desk. She bent over and stared at Kavner, her eyebrows scrunched together, but David could tell that she wasn’t really looking at him. She was thinking of what he’d just said, her mind working furiously. “What else?” she asked. “Do you remember anything else?”
“Yes, I’m thinking of another thing now. Olam had some strange ideas about the Sephirot, the enumerations of God. As I said, there are ten Sephirot and they’re arranged in a pattern called the Tree of Life. Well, Olam said the Sephirot were really computer programs. Like the programs that come on a disk that you put into your computer when you want it to do something. I told him, ‘You’re crazy, you can’t put the enumerations of God on a computer disk,’ but he kept saying it was true. He said you could create a whole universe of stars and planets and galaxies with just a few computer programs.”
David felt a dull ache in the pit of his stomach. He thought again of the quantum computers that Jacob Steele had built, the strings of ions that could hold inconceivable amounts of data. Then he thought of Jacob’s warning about the spacetime disruption, the rip in the fabric of the universe. And now this strange talk of God and computer science and enumerations. What was the connection here? The universe is information?
He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kavner, but I still don’t understand. How did these ideas get Olam into trouble?”
The Rav didn’t answer right away. He lowered his head and stared at the floor. “Olam wanted to prove he was right. He said he could do an experiment that would test his ideas about the Sephirot. I didn’t think he was serious at first, but then he showed me the plans and drawings that the scientist in Maryland had done.” The rabbi shook his head again. “I told Olam I didn’t like it. I had a bad feeling about this project. It was like chapter eleven in Genesis, the Tower of Babel. Olam was trying to go where no one but God should go. It was an affront to the Eternal. Nothing good could come of it.”
The ache in David’s stomach grew worse. “But Olam went ahead anyway? He built the experiment?”
The rabbi raised his head. His eyes were glassy. “We were good friends. I couldn’t say no.”
“And it’s in the basement of this building, right? Attached to the fiber-optic line he installed?”
He nodded. “Olam said it was part of something called the Caduceus Array.”
NICO RANG THE BUZZER NEXT TO THE YESHIVA’S FRONT DOOR. HE STILL WORE the brown robe that made him look like a pilgrim, but under its folds he carried his combat knife and his Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter. Standing next to him in the alley was Bashir, his second-in-command, who also concealed his weapons under his pilgrim’s robe. Bashir was unusually short, barely 160 centimeters, but he was Nico’s fiercest soldier. They were both from Beirut, both veterans of Lebanon’s long civil war, and neither was particularly fond of Israelis.
After about thirty seconds the door opened again and Nico saw the same two yeshiva students who’d answered the buzzer earlier. They still had their Uzis, but instead of cradling the submachine guns with their fingers on the triggers, the students let the guns dangle from their shoulder straps. This was a sign of either poor training or stupidity, Nico thought. A gun is useless unless you’re ready to fire it. The bigger one stepped forward, putting himself within easy striking distance. “What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”
Bashir, who held an alms bowl in his left hand, moved toward the other student, who wore a skullcap with a childish design of roaring lions. “Donation, please? For the poor?”
The student shook his head. “No, we’re not—”
Bashir sliced the Jew’s throat before he could say another word. At the same time, Nico rammed his own knife into the bigger student’s throat, thrusting it in so forcefully that the tip of the blade emerged from the back of his neck. Nico grabbed the Jew’s shoulder for leverage and sawed into his carotid artery. Then he wrenched the knife out and stepped aside. The body fell forward, gushing blood on the cobblestones.
So far, so good, Nico thought. They’d gained entry into the building without raising the alarm. He threw off his robe—he wore black pants and a black shirt underneath—and whistled down the alley. Six more men dressed in black emerged from the darkness and ran toward the door.
11
THE BUILDING THE YESHIVA OCCUPIED WAS HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD AND full of makeshift rooms and stairways that had been built and rebuilt by generations of tenants. Behind what looked like a closet door in Rav Kavner’s office was a spiral stairway that descended to the basement. As the rabbi led David and Monique down the rusting iron steps, he told them that the building had once been owned by Jordanian smugglers who’d dug tunnels for sneaking wine casks under the streets of the Old City. It was pitch-black at the bottom of the stairway, but then the rabbi flipped the light switch and David saw a large room with cinderblock walls. At the far end was a square steel table, more than ten feet across, loaded with laboratory equipment: control panels and oscilloscopes and spectrometers and lasers, all linked by snaking black cables.
“Damn,” David whispered. “There must be a million dollars’ worth of equipment here.”
The Rav nodded. “Two million, actually. Olam got the money from his friend in Maryland.”
That was the money from the DARPA grant, David thought, the government funding that Jacob Steele had illegally diverted. U.S. tax dollars had paid for this experiment in Jerusalem.
Monique rushed toward the table and leaned over its edge, surveying all the instruments. There was a look of delight on her face. Her mouth hung open as she examined the lasers, which were enclosed in rectangular steel cases, about two feet long and six inches wide, with tiny circles of glass at their firing ends. She turned to the rabbi. “When did Olam build all this? It looks almost new.”
“Let me think. Was it last August? Or last July? Almost a year ago. For a couple of months he spent all his time down here. We hardly saw him. And even after he finished building the thing, he went down to the basement three or four times a day. The machines were running all the time, you see, and he had to check on them every so often to make sure they were working.”
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br /> “But the equipment isn’t running now,” Monique noted, pointing at the table. None of the LEDs on the devices were lit.
“No, Olam shut it down before he left. On Tuesday evening he went to check on his machines as usual, but this time he stayed in the basement for nearly an hour. Then he rushed into my office and said there was an emergency. He needed to visit some of his old friends in the army, he said. He didn’t say where he was going, but he promised he’d come back to the yeshiva the next morning.” The rabbi frowned. “But he didn’t come back. Not the next day and not this morning either. I called the police this afternoon but they said I had to wait another day before I could file a missing-person report.”
David approached the table and stood next to Monique. She was examining a small mirror set on a metal stand in front of one of the lasers. The mirror was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle from the laser; if the device were turned on, the mirror would deflect the beam of laser light toward another small mirror on the opposite side of the table. David had seen this kind of setup in other tabletop experiments—physicists used the mirrors to guide the laser beams to their intended targets. The lasers on this particular table were turned off now, but the mirrors were still in their proper positions, so it was possible to trace the paths the beams were supposed to take. And that was exactly what Monique was doing. Her eyes darted from mirror to mirror, following the path to its end. Then she smiled and stepped around the corner of the table.
“There it is!” she said. She pointed at a pair of steel clamps that supported a glass tube, just three inches long. “That’s the vacuum chamber.”
