The Branch

by Mike Resnick

  “He lived there,” said Moira.

  “He’s been to Egypt?” asked Bernstein, suddenly interested.

  She nodded.

  “And Israel too?”

  “He grew up in the Middle East,” said Moore. “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” said Bernstein thoughtfully. “Let’s call it a lucky guess.”

  “Have you got any more guesses?” asked Moore.

  “None that I care to put on the record.”

  “You look very disturbed, Abe.”

  “I am.”

  “If you know something, I think you’d better share it with us.”

  “I don’t know anything. For just a second I had a crazy notion. Let’s forget it.”

  “It’s probably not any crazier than a man regrowing an eye and some fingers,” said Moore. “Let’s hear it.”

  Bernstein shook his head firmly.

  “All right,” said Moore with a shrug. “In that case, we’ll operate under the assumption that Jeremiah is either a mutant of as yet unknown powers, or an incredibly skilled surgeon, which seems like the least likely explanation of all. I’ll have Ben dig us up a scientist or two who knows something about mutation.”

  “It won’t help,” said Bernstein.

  “Besides, Jeremiah hasn’t been seen since Darktown,” added Moira.

  “Why don’t we just assume he’s left the city? Then you can get back to work, and I can go home to the museum.”

  “Because if I let one guy get away with trying to kill me,” explained Moore, “how long do you think it will be before others start lining up to take a crack at it?”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” said Moira.

  “You don’t have to like it; you just have to do it,” retorted Moore.

  Suddenly Bernstein walked to the door.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” demanded Moore.

  “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do,” replied Bernstein uncomfortably.

  “You look like you’re scared shitless.”

  “If truth be known, I am.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Where can I find you if I need you?”

  “I’ll be at my temple,” said Bernstein.

  Moore uttered a sarcastic laugh. “What kind of crap are you handing out here? I know you: every time you get scared you threaten to quit and move to Florida.”

  “I don’t think quitting will help this time.”

  “And going to temple will?” asked Moore with a smile.

  “Yes,” answered Bernstein seriously. “I think it will.”

  Chapter 9

  We’ve got him surrounded, sir!”

  “Where?”

  “Lakeport.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Moore slammed the phone down, summoned Moira, Pryor, and half a dozen security men, and headed for Lakeport, the huge airport complex that floated atop Lake Michigan, some ten miles off Chicago’s shoreline.

  When they arrived they found that Jeremiah was trapped inside an empty hangar. As far as Moore could tell, there was no possible means of escape. Thirty armed men encircled the building, their weapons trained on every door and window. Still more men were backing up the first group, and the remainder of his security force was carefully checking the passengers on all incoming and outgoing boats and planes.

  Furthermore, the city—or those members of its government who were personally obligated to Moore—had blocked off all other means of ingress and egress: the ramps, the tunnels, the monorails.

  “How did you spot him?” Moore asked the man in charge.

  “He tried to buy a ticket to Cairo.”

  “Egypt or Illinois?”

  “Egypt. A couple of our agents identified him.”

  “You’re sure it’s Jeremiah?”

  “Him or his twin brother,” came the reply. “He fits the description we’ve got to a T, and he raced off like a bat out of hell when we called him by name.”

  “And he’s still in the hangar?”

  “Right.”

  “Moira, you come with me,” said Moore. “I want to be absolutely certain we’ve got the right man.”

  “I don’t think you should go in,” she said. “He could be more dangerous than you think.”

  “I want to make sure that what happened last time doesn’t happen again,” said Moore. “Or if it does, I want to see it with my own eyes.”

  He took a handgun from one of the guards and, gesturing to his own security team to accompany him, entered the hangar.

  It was quite large, almost four hundred feet long by two hundred wide and eighty high, and displayed no sign of life. Moore directed one of the men to turn on the lights, but found that the additional illumination didn’t make much difference. He looked up at a number of ramps that ran along the inside wall of the hangar at a height of about fifty feet, trying to locate a likely place of concealment. There was none.

  “All right,” he announced at last. “It’s obvious that he can’t get out past our men, so we can take our time about this. We’ll proceed as a unit and go over every inch of the damned building.”

  They began following the wall to the left, moving slowly and carefully, looking under, behind, and inside every object large enough to hide a man. They had gone about two hundred feet when they heard a shuffling sound from the far wall of the hangar.

  “Over there!” shouted Moore, racing in the direction of the noise.

  He and his men got to within fifty feet of a large baggage carrier when a young man stepped out from behind it, his hands above his head.

  “Is that him?” Moore asked Moira.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Moore stared at the young man for a long moment. Finally he shrugged.

  “Kill him,” he ordered.

  “No!” screamed Jeremiah. “I’m unarmed! You can’t do this! I’m—”

  Seven guns exploded in unison, Moore’s included, and Jeremiah was flung some thirty feet away by the impact of the bullets. As soon as he stopped rolling over he got groggily to his feet and began running.

  “What the hell is going on here?” muttered Moore. He fired again at Jeremiah, who was limping painfully but rapidly toward a door at the far end of the hangar as a hail of bullets struck the walls around him.

  Moore took up the chase, shooting as he went. Jeremiah fell twice more, but each time managed to regain his feet and continue running toward the door. He reached it mere seconds ahead of Moore and raced out into the sunlight.

  Moore stepped through the doorway just in time to see an airplane skid off a runway and head directly toward the hangar. He took in the situation at a glance, then ducked back inside the hangar and threw himself to the floor. There was a loud explosion an instant later, followed by two smaller ones and a burst of heat and smoke.

  The hangar caught fire instantly, and beams and girders began falling to the floor. Moore got to his feet and began running to the undamaged end of the building. Moira and two of the security men followed him, but the others had disappeared under the rapidly accumulating rubble.

  When he reached the door through which he had entered, he stepped outside, checked himself for injuries, found nothing but some superficial bruises and abrasions, and circled around the hangar to view the carnage. The air stank of burning flesh, and fifty of his men lay dead or severely mangled near the wreckage of the plane. A rescue crew was already on the scene, and half a dozen more were speeding toward the scene.

  “Where is he?” demanded Moore, trying to spot Jeremiah’s corpse in among the other bodies.

  “He couldn’t have survived that,” replied one of the security men firmly. “He was right in the middle of it. You’ll be lucky if you can find the fillings from his teeth.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Moore, “but I want the entire area checked anyway. And I want somebody to find out what happened to the plane—what made i
t skid and crash.” He turned to Moira, who was bleeding from her mouth. “Are you all right?”

  “I will be, after I see a dentist,” she said. “I have a couple of teeth loose.” She looked down at her torn, grime-covered suit. “I think I could probably use a change of clothes, too. How about you, Mr. Moore? You look dreadful.”

  “I’m okay. Just shaken up a little,” he said. “Let’s get back to the office. There’s nothing much we can do here.”

  They arrived, patched up most of their wounds, and changed into fresh clothes just in time to receive Pryor’s first report from Lakeport: the plane’s landing gear had failed to function. A brief preliminary investigation hadn’t turned up any signs of sabotage.

  Ten minutes later there was a second call from Pryor. A horribly mangled young man who matched Jeremiah’s description had managed to board an airliner at gunpoint, and was, according to the pilot’s radio message, preparing to parachute down somewhere over the Pocono Mountains.

  “I wish I knew what the hell is happening!” snapped Moore after hanging up the receiver.

  “I don’t understand,” said Moira.

  “Your boyfriend has more lives than a goddamned cat.”

  “You don’t mean to say that Jeremiah is alive?”

  “Alive and free,” said Moore. “The son of a bitch not only lived through that holocaust, but he managed to hijack a plane.”

  “But that’s impossible!” exclaimed Moira.

  “Evidently not,” replied Moore. “I seem to remember Sherlock Holmes telling Dr. Watson that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. If we apply that to Jeremiah, the one thing that remains is that there’s no way in hell that he can be a normal man with normal abilities—if he’s a man at all.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a man, a mutant, or an alien,” persisted Moira. “No one could have survived that!”

  “Someone did,” said Moore. “Him.”

  “There must be some mistake,” she insisted. “Probably they identified the wrong man as Jeremiah.”

  “I don’t believe that, and neither do you,” said Moore soberly.

  “But there’s no other rational explanation!”

  “You’ve noticed,” he said wryly.

  “He’s got to be dead!”

  Moore stared at her as if to argue, then shrugged. “I’ve been letting too damned many subordinates check up on Jeremiah. I think it’s time that I did a little homework myself.”

  “Beginning where?” asked Moira.

  “At the beginning,” said Moore. “We’ve had people working around the clock trying to find out something about this guy. I want to go over every last shred of information they’ve put together. And I want you to submit to the psycho-probe again, once you get your teeth fixed. Maybe it can drag something out of you that it missed the first time around.”

  Moira left the office, and Moore waited until all the material, sparse as it was, had been assembled on his desk. Then he locked the door and began going over it slowly and methodically.

  There still wasn’t much.

  To those few tidbits of information he already possessed were added the following: Jeremiah’s parents were agnostic Jews, and he himself was an atheist.

  Jeremiah had had a vasectomy two years ago while living in Seattle.

  Jeremiah had not only had the normal childhood diseases, but had actually contracted typhoid and an unknown sleeping sickness. In both cases he was near death, but miraculously recovered.

  Jeremiah’s mother had published two small monographs concerning some obscure theories about the ancient Mesopotamians.

  Neither had received any coverage whatsoever from the academic community.

  Jeremiah’s full name was Immanuel Jeremiah Branch, and he was the son of Marvin H. Branch and Linda Branch.

  And that, in a nutshell, was that. The sum total of his knowledge of Jeremiah wouldn’t fill two sheets of typing paper. In fact, the only thing Moore had learned—or, rather, deduced—was the genesis of the names Jeremiah the B and Manny the B.

  He heard nothing further from Pryor, and Moira was still undergoing the psycho-probe, so he decided to return to his apartment for the first time in days, hoping that in the comfort of his library he might be able to sort out the day’s events and perhaps make a little sense out of them.

  When he arrived home, he took a hot shower and tended to his wounds once again. Then he prepared a quick dinner consisting primarily of non-soya vegetable products, and spent two hours sitting on his old leather chair, pondering over the few notes he had scribbled and wondering what they had in common with a man who could survive gunfire and plane crashes with equal facility. It wasn’t as if he had done it with style, either; Moore was certain that Jeremiah was fully as surprised at his ability to cheat death as everyone else was.

  Moore stared at the notes for a few more minutes, and finally three words caught his attention: Immanuel Jeremiah Branch.

  Somewhere, deep in the forgotten recesses of his mind, that name rang a bell, or perhaps a series of them. It seemed familiar, though he was sure he had never come across it before.

  Curious, he walked over to a long-unopened copy of Burke’s Peerage, and was not surprised to find that there was no such name listed there.

  He then pulled down a couple of books devoted to coats of arms, with the same results. He even tried the Chicago and Manhattan phone directories, still with no luck.

  And then, on a hunch, he picked up a copy of the Bible. As far as the name Immanuel went, he knew of only one place where he could recall seeing it, and he turned to the Book of Isaiah, thumbing through it until he came to Chapter 8: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

  “Well,” he muttered, “so much for Immanuel.”

  The hoped-for Immanuel, Isaiah went on to say, would eat butter and honey and learn to refuse evil and choose the good—which certainly didn’t sound like the Immanuel that Moore was after.

  He was about to put the book back when he riffled through the pages once with his thumb to shake the dust loose.

  That was when he saw it, flashing briefly before his eyes. He bent back the leather cover and let the pages race by again, but couldn’t pick it out, so he began turning them one at a time until it reached out and hit him right between the eyes, capital letters and all: “Here now, O Joshua the high priest, thou, and thy fellows that sit before thee: for they are men wondered at: for behold, I will bring forth my servant The BRANCH.”

  It was the Book of Zechariah, and he read on, searching for some other reference to The BRANCH.

  He found it.

  “… Thus speaketh the Lord of Hosts, saying, behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord; and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne.…”

  Two minutes later he was on the phone to Bernstein.

  “Abe, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Did Moira give us something new?” asked Bernstein.

  “I don’t care what the hell she gave us. How conversant are you with the Bible?”

  “I knew you’d ask sooner or later,” sighed Bernstein, “but I never thought it would be this quick.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I grew up with the Old Testament. I’m not as well acquainted with the other one.”

  “That’s okay. The Old Testament is what I’m interested in. What can you tell me about The BRANCH? All capital letters. It’s in Zechariah.”

  “Hold on while I get my copy,” said Bernstein.

  Moore waited impatiently while Bernstein, with a great deal of noise and a muffled curse as he bumped into a chair, walked across his room, picked up a Bible, and limped back to the phone.

  “I’m back,” he announced painfully.

  “Have you got the place?” asked Moore.

  �
�Zechariah. Right.”

  “Fine. Who is The BRANCH, and why is he called that?”

  “It’s a guarded reference to the Messiah,” said Bernstein, after reading the chapter half aloud, half to himself. “The BRANCH refers to his being a fresh branch from the withered Davidic family tree.”

  “Why the Davidic tree?”

  “Because one of the few things the Messianic prophets agreed upon was that the Messiah—which is simply Aramaic for Anointed One—would come from the line of David.”

  “Ready for another question?”

  “Go ahead,” said Bernstein.

  “How many present-day Jews can trace their ancestry back to David?”

  “None.”

  “Then it’s a dead line?” asked Moore.

  “I have no idea. But I know that no one can trace his lineage back that far. You’re talking three thousand years or more.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Moore at last.

  “It’s crazy, Solomon.”

  “I know. So is everything else that’s been happening lately.”

  “It’s so farfetched that I’m embarrassed to even admit that the thought had crossed my mind,” said Bernstein.

  “Me too.”

  “He’s more likely to be a man from Mars.”

  “I agree,” said Moore. “But I want you to do me a favor anyway.”

  “If it’s within my power.”

  “Meet me at my office tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not quite.”

  “What else?” asked Bernstein.

  “Bring your rabbi.”

  Chapter 10

  Solomon, allow me to introduce you to Rabbi Milton Greene,” said Bernstein.

  Moore arose and stared at the young man who stood before him in a striped, floor-length robe.

  “Call me Milt,” said Greene, extending his hand.

  “That’s quite an outfit you’ve got there,” commented Moore, taking his hand.

  “My coat of many colors?” replied Greene with a smile. He turned around once. “I wove it on my own loom.”