“What did you find?” Levi asked, peering curiously over Michael’s shoulder.
“Not sure what it is. Never seen anything like it before,” Michael said. With his rubber-gloved hands, Michael examined the objects. Looking closer, he noted that one of them had what appeared to be the number thirteen scratched into its lead casing.
After placing them in a container in the back of the truck, Michael picked up Rover and put him away, then pulled the truck out of the way so Levi could do his job. As Levi pulled into position, Michael took out one of the mysterious objects again. With a small screwdriver, he unfolded the lead casing and found a broken computer flash drive.
Wow, he thought to himself. This flash drive didn’t cover itself in lead, but why would someone want to do that anyway? And how did it get down there?
Carefully placing the flash drive and lead casing back into a dry container, Michael rejoined Levi, who was lowering the hydro-jet into the manhole. A hydro-jet truck was basically a high-pressure spray hose connected to a metal jet head. Water from the truck’s holding tank was pressurized up to four thousand psi and could be pumped at up to eight gallons a minute. Under full pressure, it could easily cut off a man’s hand.
Levi ran the jet hose up the pipe to the obstruction. Cranking up the pressure, he attacked the stoppage. After several minutes with no results, an obviously frustrated Levi said, “Don’t know what’s blocking the pipe, Michael, but I can’t break it free.”
“Magnets,” Michael said.
“What?” Levi asked, looking at him like he’d gone crazy.
Michael shook his head. “Humor me,” he said. He had been thinking about it for the past several minutes, and although it didn’t make much sense, the only explanation he could come up with was that there seemed to be a strong magnetic field surrounding the sewer pipe. To his knowledge, the only way to make a magnet that strong was by using electricity. If it was an electromagnet, they could turn off the electricity and release the debris. It was a long shot, but worth a try.
Michael walked back to his truck and replayed the recording from Rover. Pulling out the “as built” sewer drawings for this section of town, he found the exact location of the obstruction based on Rover’s measurements. It was just one foot up from the bakery’s connection to the city’s main. This likely meant that if there was some sort of electromagnet down there, it would be connected to the bakery’s power supply.
Walking over to the storefront, he saw the sign in the window. Great, he thought. The baker would not be back for several days. The electric meter box was on the side of the building. It was unlocked, so Michael opened it, looking for the main disconnect. Finding the main breakers, he pulled down on them.
“There she blows, Michael!” Levi shouted from the manhole. “I hear it coming down the line!”
Michael waited a few more minutes and then turned the bakery’s power back on. Who knew how much food might spoil if he left the power off indefinitely? Well, they had fixed the problem for now, but he would talk to his supervisor and see what they should do about a permanent solution. Closing up the manhole and packing up their things, they headed back to the shop for the evening.
Michael was tired and dirty but also curious. He had a feeling the computer capsules he’d found in the sewer might be important, so he decided to drive to the house of an old friend. Marcus Nayat lived in north Tel Aviv, so his place was out of the way—but if anyone could figure out what these gray capsules were for, Marcus could. Marcus Nayat had been in the army with Michael, but as an intel officer. Marcus was still in the army, but he would not say exactly what he did anymore.
After a few moments, Marcus opened the door and with a warm smile and a hearty hello asked Michael in. “What brings you by tonight, my friend?”
“Sorry to show up so late unannounced, Marcus, but I found something today I thought I would run by you.” Michael explained his discovery and then pulled the computer flash drives and lead casings out of his pocket.
Marcus took one of the drives in his hand and examined it with a look of serious curiosity. “You found these down in the sewer, you said?”
“Yes, lying on the bottom of the pipe in this lead casing.” Michael indicated the lead sheeting he still held in his hand.
Marcus looked up. “Do you mind if I hang on to these for a day or so? I will get back to you when I know more. Oh, and hold off on notifying anyone of what you found tonight. Especially do not let the baker know you turned off his power. This could be important. Thank you for coming to me with this.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, then Michael said good night and left. If anyone could get to the bottom of this, he knew Marcus could. He would be interested to find out what Marcus learned, but right now all he wanted was a cold beer, a hot shower, and bed.
* * *
After Michael left, Marcus Nayat carefully inspected the leaden capsules. In all his years as a Mossad intelligence officer, he’d never seen anything quite like them. What was their purpose? On one of them was a small number thirteen scratched into the casing. The hair on his head began to prickle. This would have to be reported outside the normal channels—the Guardian would want to know. Marcus picked up his secure private phone and dialed a number that had been committed to his memory for over a decade.
Two thousand, two hundred and eleven miles away, a phone rang on an ancient walnut desk in the heart of London. The desk sat on a jet black polished granite floor in one end of a massive two-story private library. The room was filled floor to ceiling with ancient books of all sorts. Two rolling ladders on brass casters stood at either end of the poorly lit room. A massive crystal chandelier hung from its brass trimmings in the center of the room directly over a circle with a diameter of exactly six feet. This circle was in the form of a six-inch-wide band of white granite cunningly inlaid into the polished black floor. At the very center lay a single piece of round white granite six inches in diameter.
A massive hand reached for the phone on the third ring. “Yes?” he asked with a passionless tone as cold as ice.
Marcus spoke into the receiver words he had memorized long ago. “I am Tacitus, a fellow traveler, come from the East.”
The cold voice at the other end replied, “For what are you searching?”
“The light.”
Sounding as if it had dropped a few more degrees, the voice replied, “Proceed with your quest.”
While the cold voice listened, Marcus described the leaden capsules and the circumstances surrounding their discovery. When he had finished, the voice, tinged with a touch of anger—or was it fear? Marcus could not tell which—asked, “And you say one of the capsules was marked with the number thirteen?”
“Yes, that is correct,” Marcus replied.
“I want to know everything related to this matter from this point forward, and I want to know it before it happens. Is that understood?”
Marcus, with the sinister, unspoken threat seeping into his bones, replied, “I understand.”
The connection went dead. Marcus was unsettled. He’d never had cause to make the call before, but those many years ago he had sworn an oath—many oaths, in fact. Those oaths demanded a loyalty that superseded all others. He did not know exactly what this was about, but those many years ago they had instructed him that should he ever see or hear of any communications marked or associated with the number thirteen, no matter how inconsequential, he should immediately call the number.
He remembered asking himself back then what could be so important that it demanded such attention. From the tone of the cold voice at the other end of the phone, he knew that after all these years, whatever it was, it was still of great interest to the Order.
Chapter 37
Manhattan, New York City
Sitting at his desk in FBI headquarters, David considered the events of the past several months. So many incredible changes had taken place that the intelligence community was just playing catch-up. The events in Manhattan ha
d devastated the economy of New York City as well as the state. The financial district of New York was no more. Lower Manhattan was deserted. The experts were still trying to determine the extent of the water system’s radioactivity and diesel contamination. Some were even speculating that the only way to make Manhattan habitable again was to replace all of the city’s water piping, from the city’s main to the smallest pipe and fixture in every building and residence.
The case against Joe Douglas was growing. So far they’d determined that he had acted with funding from agents of al-Qaeda and/or Iran. The evidence accumulated showed he had carried out the attack by himself. Every law-enforcement official in the nation was having nightmares about this low-technology assault upon the American urban way of life. There was really nothing that could be done to prevent similar attacks from being carried out in cities and towns across America. Sure, not every attack would have radioactive contamination, but the terrorists really didn’t need it. Without clean, pure water, most urban communities were uninhabitable.
The most unsettling fact was that such an attack could be carried out with impunity, and the results were as disruptive as if a bomb had gone off—maybe even more so. The only good that had come out of this, as far as David could see, was that some of the American people were waking up. Those willing to think for themselves realized that the government, at whatever levels, could not be counted on to protect them. They were taking action. Many decided to provide themselves an edge should similar events happen in their own communities. Some stored their own clean water, while others purchased water purification equipment. On balance, a new awareness of each individual responsibility to self, family, and community was taking hold all over America.
With the events in Manhattan, the subpoena of Google’s download records was granted by a federal judge without a problem. David and his team had been going over the records for weeks now. Finding the intended recipients of the encrypted pictures was not going to be as easy as they had thought. There were literally hundreds of people who had downloaded the pictures in just the New York area alone—who knew so many people cared about their junk mail?
The list of people who had downloaded the pictures was fed into the various law-enforcement databases around the world to see if any of the junk mail downloaders were known entities. It was learned that Joe Douglas had been downloading the Google junk mail pictures for the past several months. This provided them with a link between the encrypted files, Joe Douglas, and a greater, as of yet unknown, conspiracy.
David was under no illusions as to getting quick results. The sheer number of names they had to go through would take several more weeks, if not months. Even then, the recipients might never communicate directly with their handlers, making it almost impossible to prove any connection with a spy network. Well, no one ever said it would be easy. At least Joe Douglas was confirmation that there was a terrorist network out there using the Anaj software to communicate with its members by means of innocuous junk mail. That was a start. With a lot of hard work and persistence, they would be able to track down the other members of the network.
For all their sakes, David hoped they could do it before there was another attack.
Chapter 38
Tel Aviv, Israel
When Michael Goldburg got to work the next evening, Marcus Nayat was sitting in his office.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” Michael said. “Those little drives must have gotten someone’s attention.”
You have no idea, Marcus thought to himself. He withdrew the four lead-encased objects from his pocket. “Michael, we need you to take these flash drives and immediately place them back in the sewer line where you found them.”
Michael looked at Marcus with incredulous surprise. “You want me to put them back in the city sewer main?”
“We think you might have stumbled upon a spy network in Tel Aviv. For some time now our intelligence service has been concerned because some of our normal sources of intelligence traffic have gone silent. With your discovery, we may have found the means by which they have been communicating. We believe the electromagnetic field around the sewer pipe in the bakery ensnares these flash drives, allowing them to be retrieved. We have put the bakery under twenty-four-hour surveillance. These four devices,” Marcus held them up, “have files on them encrypted by a method American intelligence believes was used by the American terrorist Joe Douglas. It is possible these files may be part of a much larger network.”
Michael shook his head, bewildered but tracking. Marcus continued, “Our technological wizards have added very small tracking devices to these flash drives. If you insert them back in the pipe, it is our hope we can follow them back to where they came from. If we can do this without being noticed, we have a good chance of discovering who is responsible for the New York attack as well as what intelligence they are passing from Israel. Our agents have also begun to set up twenty-four-hour surveillance of the main sewer piping from various locations upstream of the bakery. If we can figure out how they are delivering these leaden capsules to the bakery magnet, with time, we can gradually back track them to their points of origin.”
With a serious look on his face, Michael asked, “Whoever thought of that idea was pretty clever. Had it not been for the steel wool getting caught on the magnet, we would never have known.”
Marcus interrupted him. “That and your very astute observations, Michael. Had you not picked up the devices, we still wouldn’t have known. Now, hopefully you can get them back to the same location without anyone being the wiser. Be advised: if you do any further video inspection of the main line upstream of the bakery, you may see our monitoring cameras. We would appreciate it if you would keep the number of people who know of our activities to a minimum.”
“I can do better than that, Marcus. I will make that section of the sewer line a mandatory supervisor assist. They’ll have to call me before anyone goes out on a call should that section of the line stop up again.”
Marcus nodded. “That will work. We appreciate your cooperation. Hopefully we can find out who is behind these activities and thwart their future plans.”
After shaking hands, Marcus left. Shortly thereafter, Michael took the little flash drives, and with Rover’s help, placed them back where he had found them in the sewer line.
Chapter 39
Dallas, Texas
After returning from Israel in the fall, Zane had been so busy with school and his obsession with the research paper on the prophecy of Daniel’s seventy weeks that he had not paid any attention to his shares of AQES—that was, until now. Spring break was coming up, and his trip to Israel in the fall had used the money he’d originally saved for the spring break archeology dig. He had been invited to be present when they opened the display for the artifacts he had found several years before with Yoseph. Finding those artifacts had changed the direction of his life, and he had really wanted to be there. He’d volunteered at a dig for a few days as well. Now he didn’t have enough money to go back. He didn’t regret it, though. More soberly he thought about the trip, his rescue of Rachael, and the ensuing media circus. She was one interesting individual, that was for sure. Maybe he would look her up when he returned to Israel. He wondered what his impressions of her would be under more normal circumstances.
This year, CPBH had assigned him to the Capernaum dig. To get his hands dirty with the same dirt Jesus had walked on, working in a place where the Messiah had done so many miracles and spent so much time—as a Christian and an archeology enthusiast, it didn’t get much better than Capernaum. It was an opportunity not to be missed, but he didn’t want to ask his parents for any money, so the only thing he could think of was to sell some of his AQES shares.
It was now February, and it had been almost four months since Zane had checked his Ameritrade investment account. Logging in, he almost fell out of his chair.
It said his account value was just over two million dollars. That couldn’t be correct!
He picked up the phone. Sam answered on the fifth ring with a sleepy, “Hello?”
“Sam, how long were you going to wait to tell me AQES was over a hundred dollars?” Zane burst out.
“Well, hello to you too, bro. I figured you had been watching and would give me a call when you were ready.”
“Sam, my account value is just over two million now! Don’t you think I should sell some?”
Sam chuckled. “Yes, I think you should start selling some now. Set yourself a sell schedule and stick to it. I would start by selling a thousand shares right now, and continue to do so at specific price intervals until you’ve sold them all. Right now it doesn’t look like Aquarius Elemental Solutions can do anything wrong. They’re the largest company in the world. And they’re giving most of their gross sale proceeds to the Aquarius Fund to improve living conditions in the third world. It’s hard to see any downside.”
Zane quirked an eyebrow. “Then why do you sound so skeptical?”
“It’s times like these when everything is going perfectly that you should pay the most attention. AQES may go to one thousand or higher over the next several years. But how much money do you really need? I have asked myself—at what point is enough enough? If we live a modest lifestyle, this money will last us both a long time. So my advice to you is, don’t let greed take over. Write out a plan for selling your shares and stick to it. For what it’s worth, I’ve been selling my shares since the twenty-dollar range. I haven’t yet sold them all, but if the current price appreciation holds, I’ll be done in a few more weeks.”
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