The Branch

by Mike Resnick

  “Eliminate the words ‘all but,’ and you’ve got it,” said Moore. “Leave him an opening and he’ll have his foot in the door before you can slam it shut. Look at what he’s done in less than four years.” He grimaced. “Give him another four and he could probably pass a constitutional amendment proclaiming his divinity.”

  “What will he do if we fight him to a standstill?”

  “If you fight him to a standstill, he’s already won,” answered Moore. “How many new citizens emigrate to Israel in a year? Less than Jeremiah picks up in a day. If you fight to a draw it’s all over, because he’ll be back twice as strong six months later. You’ve got two choices: beat him decisively the first time you meet him, or sue for peace. There’s no third alternative.”

  “And not a government in the world has offered to stand with us,” said Naomi Wizner bitterly.

  “We have always stood alone against our enemies,” said Yitzak. “Why should this time be any different?”

  “That’s the wrong attitude,” said Moore. “They’re not giving out prizes for bravery this season. He’s already got twice as many followers as you have citizens. You’re going to have to get help.”

  “From where?” asked Yitzak with a bitter laugh.

  “How the hell should I know? Arm the Catholics and the Muslims. Get ITT to finance an army. Tell the Chinese they’re next on his hit list. But do something!”

  “You’re right, of course,” interjected Naomi hastily. “And I won’t be revealing any secrets if I tell you that we have been actively trying to rally support to our cause—thus far without noticeable success.” She paused. “However, these are definitely not your problems, Mr. Moore. What we would like you to do is come to Jerusalem in an advisory capacity.”

  “I don’t know anything about fighting a war.”

  “We are aware of that,” said Yitzak.

  “Then what do you need me for?”

  “Of those people committed to the defense of Jerusalem, you are the only one who has ever met Jeremiah face-to-face. I realize you think you have told us everything you know about the way his mind works, but there is always a chance you have overlooked something—or, more likely still, that you will be able to improve some section of our defense based on facts and insights that we do not possess. To this end, we are prepared to offer you a temporary commission in the Israeli Army if you will come to Jerusalem and let us pick your mind as best we can.”

  Moore considered the offer for a moment, then turned to Yitzak. “And what if you become convinced that he’s the Messiah?”

  “Then I shall do his bidding,” replied Yitzak promptly. He held up his hand as Moore began to speak. “But let me add that the only way he can convince me is by defeating our army in battle, at which point the entire matter becomes academic.”

  Moore walked over to the viewscreen and studied the fish for a few minutes. Finally he turned back to the two Israelis. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. And you can keep your commission; I’m no soldier.”

  “It will get you preferential treatment and quarters of your own,” said Yitzak.

  “I don’t know any protocol,” protested Moore. “And I have a feeling that I won’t like saluting fellow officers.”

  “Israeli soldiers don’t salute—they fight,” said Yitzak, not without a trace of pride. “From this moment on, you are Colonel Solomon Moore. You are responsible to no one but myself, and your sole duty will be to analyze Jeremiah’s actions and advise me on how best to respond to them.” He smiled wryly. “I cannot promise to take any of your advice, but I do promise to listen.”

  “Fair enough,” said Moore.

  Yitzak stood up. “How soon can you be ready to leave?”

  “I’ve got some business affairs to put in order,” replied Moore. “It’ll take about a day. I don’t think I’ll be returning to Chicago, so I’ll catch the next flight to London from Kingston, and make connections there.”

  “Nonsense,” said Yitzak. “I’ll have my own plane ready and waiting for you twenty-four hours from now. We are about to become inseparable companions.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Moore led them to the door, then picked up the phone and began putting his affairs in order. First he instructed his lawyers to place what remained of his personal holdings into a blind trust. While he was waiting for them to fly out to the Bubble for his signature, he called Pryor on his vidphone.

  “What’s up?” asked Pryor, adjusting the picture he was receiving. “The last time you bothered with video contact was the day you bought out the Portofilio Family.”

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Ben,” said Moore. “I thought it might be more comfortable to do it this way.”

  “Fine by me,” said Pryor, pouring himself a drink.

  “I’m leaving for Jerusalem tomorrow.”

  “Good! Either you’ll kill him, or I’ll wind up in charge of things. Either way I’m happy.”

  “How touching,” remarked Moore dryly.

  “You don’t really want me to lie to you, do you?” asked Pryor easily. “How long before Jeremiah attacks?”

  “Soon. A week or two at most, based on what our associates have told me. However, that’s neither here nor there. I called to give you some information you’re going to need if I don’t come back.”

  Pryor turned on a tape machine. “Shoot.”

  For the next two hours Moore listed the politicians, criminals, businessmen, newsmen, and religious leaders who were either owned outright by the organization or at least beholden to it. He spent another hour laying out the details of those enterprises that he had never committed to paper, and noted with some satisfaction that even Pryor was surprised by the extent of them. All were hurting at the moment, but few of them were so moribund that Jeremiah’s demise couldn’t bring them back to glowing health and solvency in a year’s time.

  “And Ben,” he concluded, “I want you to understand that until you have proof of my death, nothing has changed.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Don’t play stupid, Ben; it’s unbecoming. I want you to think very carefully before letting your reach exceed your grasp. I’m still in charge.”

  “Absolutely, Solomon.”

  “I don’t expect to be gone more than a couple of weeks, a month at the most. You haven’t time to consolidate power during that period, and I strongly suggest that you allow discretion to remain the better part of valor.”

  “If I were the type to move prematurely, I’d have grabbed for the brass ring before now,” replied Pryor frankly. “Besides, the odds are that you’ll be dead in two more weeks. I’ve waited nine years; I can wait half a month more.”

  Moore smiled. “That sounds more like the Ben Pryor we all know and love. And now let me give you a final order: take the hit off Jeremiah and Moira, and bring our operatives back into the business. It’s strictly a military matter now, and our people are out of their depth. Let the Israeli Army handle Jeremiah from here on out; we’ll concentrate on making money.”

  His call completed, he phoned Chicago on a private line that Pryor knew nothing about, and instructed a couple of spies to make sure that Pryor didn’t try to jump the gun. This done, he lay down for what he anticipated would be his last comfortable night’s sleep for quite some time, awoke nine hours later, conferred with his lawyers, concluded a couple of business arrangements that he had decided to withhold from Pryor, and had an order of eggs Benedict sent up to the room. He ate, showered, and donned the rather bedraggled uniform that Yitzak had sent up to his room at midmorning.

  Then, at the appointed time, he took an elevator to the ocean’s surface, took his private helicopter to Kingston’s airport, and found Yitzak waiting for him. The Israeli general led him to a small plane, they walked up a mobile stairway, the door closed behind them, and a moment later they were airborne.

  “Any change in the situation?” asked Moore, sitting down on a swivel chair that was bolted to the floor.r />
  “We still don’t know where Jeremiah is, if that’s what you mean,” replied Yitzak. “As for his army, they’re practically knocking at the door. They’re in Gaza, they’re on the Golan Heights, they’re at various positions in Sinai. And, of course, they’re almost impossible to identify: no uniforms, no similarity of weapons, no common language. Someone is obviously giving them orders, telling them when and where to move, but we haven’t been able to penetrate their chain of command.”

  “Any skirmishes yet?”

  “No,” answered Yitzak. “It’s my own guess that Egypt and Jordan have made some accommodation with them which includes confining the battle to Israeli soil.”

  “Why play by their ground rules?” asked Moore.

  “I don’t believe I understand you.”

  “What’s to stop you from attacking them now, before they reach Israel?”

  “Because, as I mentioned, they are indistinguishable from the natives of the surrounding countries. The only way to wipe them out at this time would be to unleash our thermonuclear arsenal, and literally tens of millions of innocent people would die.” He paused. “We, of all people, are just a little sensitive about committing genocide.”

  “Can’t you move your army across the border and attack with conventional weapons?” persisted Moore.

  “Genocide on any scale is unacceptable to us,” replied Yitzak. “Our best hope is to capture or kill Jeremiah before it comes to that.”

  “It’s going to come to that sooner or later,” said Moore. “You’re not going to kill him, and he’s not going to chance being captured. So why not fight on Syrian or Egyptian or Jordanian soil? Slice them down quick enough and you might give the rest of his followers second thoughts.”

  “It is not my decision to make. The order has already been given. For the moment, there is to be no bloodbath.”

  “Stupid,” commented Moore.

  “Now that I’ve given you the official line,” said Yitzak, suddenly looking very tired, “let me personally agree with you. While we have made no military alliances, we cannot be sure that the same is true of Jeremiah. The sooner we join this battle, the better.”

  They discussed the situation further as the plane raced toward Yitzak’s beleaguered country. Finally, when they were through speaking, Moore dined on knishes and kreplach, washed them down with a red wine, positioned himself as comfortably as he could on his chair, and fell asleep.

  He was awakened some time later when the plane started bucking like an untamed horse. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, sitting up abruptly.

  “Ground fire,” said Yitzak. “We’re over Sinai.” He tossed a parachute to Moore. “Here. Slip this on, just in case.”

  Moore watched Yitzak, copied his movements, and soon had his own parachute on.

  Yitzak looked out a window. “We should be out of range in another minute or—”

  There was a thunderous explosion, the plane shuddered convulsively, and Moore looked out just in time to see a wing catch fire. They went into a spinning nose dive, trailing flames and black smoke, and Yitzak helped Moore to a hatch.

  “I’ll go first,” he announced. “When you see my parachute open, pull the rip cord on your own.”

  “Where is it?” asked Moore, surprised that he didn’t feel more panic-stricken.

  Yitzak pointed it out to him, opened the door, and jumped. Moore followed him a second later. It took him a couple of seconds to get his bearings, but finally he figured out where up and down were. Then he looked ahead and saw the flaming plane plunging toward the earth.

  After a time he became aware that Yitzak had already opened his parachute, and he pulled the rip cord on his own. He thought for an instant that the sudden jerk on the harness would rip him in half, but it didn’t, and suddenly the parachute blossomed like a giant flower and his rate of descent slowed somewhat, though he was still certain that he would be crushed the moment he hit the ground.

  When he was about two thousand feet from the ground he looked once again for Yitzak’s chute, and saw it about half a mile northeast of him. He became disoriented again, then forced himself to stare at the ground until he once again regained his bearings. A gust of wind hit him at fifty feet and carried him toward Yitzak. It stopped as quickly as it had begun, and he had to decide whether to attempt to land on his feet or hit the ground rolling. He opted for the latter, watched the sandy loam racing up to meet him, tried to remember how he had been taught to fall during his brief interest in judo, realized at the last second that he was positioning his body wrong, and lost consciousness the instant he landed.

  Chapter 22

  Moore slowly became aware of the fact that Yitzak was trying to help him to his feet.

  “Is anything broken?” asked the Israeli.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Moore. “How do you tell if something’s broken?”

  “If you can move your arms and legs, nothing’s broken,” replied Yitzak with a smile. “Nothing important, anyway.”

  Moore spit out a tooth and a mouthful of blood. “I must have landed on my face,” he grunted.

  “It’s possible,” said Yitzak. “Difficult, but possible. And of course you’ll have a minor concussion. You can’t be knocked unconscious without concussing. But on the whole, I’d say that you made an exemplary first jump under hazardous conditions. We lost the pilot and the crew.”

  Moore took a step, wobbled slightly, and had to hold on to Yitzak’s shoulder to keep from falling. “I’m too old for this kind of thing,” he said painfully.

  “It could be worse,” said Yitzak, supporting him. “At least we landed in our own territory.”

  “It’s all desert,” said Moore, trying to focus his eyes. “How can you tell the difference?”

  “No one is shooting at us,” replied Yitzak. “Besides, Israel is a tiny country. It’s not too difficult to spot a landmark or two, such as that tel over there near that grove of trees.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Moore, rubbing his jaw and spitting out another tooth.

  “We wait. The way that plane was blazing, I imagine everyone within fifty miles must have seen us. They’ll be sending out search parties.”

  Moore began feeling dizzy, and decided to sit down and await his rescuers. They arrived about twenty minutes later in a pair of sixty-year-old Land Rovers. Yitzak issued a few terse commands, and one of the drivers helped Moore into a Land Rover and drove him straight to a hospital at the northern end of Jerusalem.

  He was examined, medicated, and sent down the street to a dentist, who took one look at his mouth, shook his head dismally, shot Moore full of painkillers, and began repairing the damage. Moore leaned back, his mouth propped open, and spent the next twenty minutes concentrating on not falling off the chair. Finally the drugs they had given him at the hospital began to take effect, and he surveyed his surroundings.

  The room itself was quite small. There were three certificates on the wall, all in Spanish, and that in turn led him to scrutinize the dentist, whom he had originally taken to be a Semite but now, in light of the certificates, could just as easily be Hispanic. It was then that he saw the golden crucifix suspended from the dentist’s neck.

  “What the hell are you doing in an Israeli dental clinic?” he managed to mutter.

  “Fixing your teeth,” replied the dentist with a smile.

  “But you’re a Catholic!”

  “And Catholics can’t repair teeth?” asked the dentist.

  “But why here? This is a battle zone.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Moore,” was the reply. “And you are no more Jewish than I am. Why are you here?”

  “To fight Jeremiah.”

  “I, too. The false Messiah must be destroyed, and if by being here I can free another Israeli to do battle against him, then I am content.”

  “What makes you think that he’s false?”

  “He must be!”

  “Don’t bet every last penny you’ve got on it.”

/>   “But we must totally discredit him!”

  “I’ll settle for just stopping him,” said Moore.

  “That is not enough,” said the dentist. “There must be no shred of doubt remaining that he is a fraud.”

  “What difference does it make, as long as we beat him?” asked Moore.

  “I am a practicing Catholic, and yet I freely acknowledge that my Church has done many wicked things, Mr. Moore. The Papacy itself has been sold numerous times, and more than one Pope has littered Europe with his bastard children and the bodies of his enemies. We slaughtered millions of Muslims during the Crusades, tortured thousands of intellectuals during the Inquisition, crushed the skulls of Incan and Aztec babies immediately after baptizing them to make sure their souls would go directly to Heaven, and fought far too many Holy Wars. And yet it is precisely because of these evils that I will defend Jesus as the true Christ to my dying breath.”

  “I don’t think I see the logic of that,” commented Moore.

  “My God, Mr. Moore!” whispered the dentist. “Think of how many millions of people have died for no reason at all if He is not the Christ! Jeremiah must be killed if for no other reason than that!”

  “Well, it’s a novel approach,” remarked Moore.

  Then the dentist leaned forward and began working on his mouth again, and he could make no further comment.

  The repair job took about two hours, with instructions to return a week later for still more work, and when Moore finally got up to leave he found Yitzak waiting for him in the outer office.

  “I understand that you have nothing more than a few bad bruises and some broken teeth,” said the Israeli vigorously. “You should be feeling just fine by tomorrow morning.”

  Moore grunted. “We are not amused.”

  “I expect you’ll want to see your quarters. They aren’t as luxurious as the New Atlantis, but I trust you will find them sufficient.”

  “I’m sure I will,” replied Moore. “The New Atlantis isn’t exactly to my taste.”

  They walked to an ancient but well-kept apartment building, where Moore followed Yitzak up two flights of stairs. The general unlocked a door and turned the key over to Moore.