“Best to raise our hands so they don’t confuse us with the bad guys,”
Enoch suggested.
They all raised their hands high.
A minute later, the rover bot came treading over the threshold and
squeaked to a stop three meters from the door. Its camera arm telescoped out and panned side to side, then settled on the three survivors.
“Wave hello,” Enoch said. He waved and flashed a thumbs-up. Then he loudly reported his name and rank for the bot’s microphone. “All clear in here,” he added.
Within seconds, soldiers began funneling into the shrine with weapons drawn, fanning out along the ambulatory.
“Just don’t touch that big gold box over there!” Amit yelled to them as they passed by.
Charlotte conveyed instructions to the Israeli commanders on how Cohen’s men had safely covered and transported the Ark. Then Amit assisted her out of the shrine, holding her by the arm.
Amit was still buzzing with excitement. This night had far and away surpassed the raw excitement of any raid in Gaza. And having beheld firsthand the Ark of the Covenant was the ultimate archaeological dream come true.
The scene outside was chaotic: helicopters set down on the Dome of the Rock’s raised platform and Israeli troops as far as the eye could see. And Enoch was at the center of it all, taking quick drags on a bummed cigarette between sentences. Encircled by IDF commanders, he was recounting in great detail what had transpired inside the dome.
Charlotte looked up at Amit. “Do you really believe that’s the Ark of the Covenant in there?”
The question surprised Amit. “You saw what it did to Cohen. Absolutely, I’d say it’s the real thing.”
“And how about me being a messiah?” she jested.
He paused to consider this. “Rabbi Cohen might have been a bit crazy. But if he believed you were . . .” He shrugged.
“Hey!” a female voice yelled over to Amit.
Glancing up, Amit was surprised to see Jules tottering over to him, shirt tied below her chest and clutching a bandage taped to her left side. Grinning widely, he stopped in his tracks.
“What is this?” Jules said with pretend offense. “I’m gone only an hour and you’re already in the arms of another woman? Haven’t you learned your lesson?”
Amit shook his head. “You’ve got chutzpah, I’ll give you that.”
Jules threw her arms around him and held him tight for five seconds. “God, I was worried sick about you.”
“How did you— ?”
“The police got to me before the ambulance arrived. When I told them what happened, they were kind enough to share their first aid kit and give me a ride here.”
“Good to see that chivalry is still alive and well,” Amit said.
“After all you told me about the temple and the Ark, I knew they’d find you here.”
“Clever.”
“Thanks.”
Amit formally introduced Charlotte.
Jules had been so focused on Amit that she hadn’t noticed the woman’s neck was covered in blood. Alarmed, she said, “My goodness, Charlotte . . . Are you all right?” Gently cradling Charlotte’s chin, she tried to find the wound. “Is this your blood?”
“Yes, but—”
“Where are you hurt? We need to take care of this.”
“Actually I’m fine, Julie. It’s a bit complicated. But thank you. How about you?” Cringing, Charlotte pointed to her bandaged stomach.
“I’ll get to the hospital later. It’s just a graze.”
“Actually, maybe I can help you with that.”
93
******
Three Days Later
As Ghalib had hoped, the Israeli prime minister and president were claiming no responsibility for the events that had taken place at Temple Mount. Naturally, they were having great difficulty explaining why the Israeli army had laid siege to the site, and why an underground tunnel had been secretly excavated beneath the site by a fundamentalist rabbi who’d been a former member of the Knesset. The firefight that had erupted inside the Dome of the Rock, however, proved most difficult to spin.
“An attack upon Islam’s third-holiest shrine will not be taken lightly,” Ghalib’s delegate promised the prime minister.
Finally, a clear line had been drawn in the sand—the tipping point.
What Ghalib’s eyes had seen over the closed-circuit cameras he’d installed in the shrine had been astounding. He’d played silent witness to the uncovering of a most profound relic. Islamic legend told that the Ark of the Covenant heralded the coming of the true Messiah—and the beginning of the Last Judgment. He’d witnessed the woman open the box. He’d witnessed how it so horribly burned the rabbi alive in mere seconds.
Shortly thereafter, he’d watched the IDF secure the building. The goateed Israeli and the woman whom Cohen had taken hostage had coached the IDF commanders on how to safely remove the relic, how to cover it first with the blue cloth and animal furs. The audio feed had crisply recorded the entire conversation.
Less than an hour after the Israelis had locked down the shrine, the relic had been ferried outside by a team of men in blue jumpsuits, heavily guarded. They’d brought it down to the Western Wall Plaza and loaded it onto a truck.
Outside, Ghalib had used his digital camcorder to secretly shoot video of that too.
All that remained now was to compile the recordings onto a single DVD, carefully edit the footage, then have a courier deliver the video to Ghalib’s contact at al-Jazeera.
Soon the world would witness firsthand the savagery of the Israelis: the carnage, the desecration, the defilement. The audacity of it all. The Islamic outcry would be deafening.
This would breathe new life into the intifada and force the Arab nations to formulate a response to the Jewish nation’s growing threat to the region. No doubt, the coalition would grow by the day as the entirety of the Middle East would be forced to take a stance—to choose a side.
His tired caramel eyes gazed out at the Dome of the Rock’s cupola, which shimmered like liquid gold against the morning sun. “Allahu Akbar,” he whispered. “Taqwa.” Fear God.
“Sorry I am late,” a breathless voice said from the doorway. “I came as fast as I could.”
Ghalib turned to the bearded Palestinian toting a laptop bag—the Waqf ’s lead IT specialist, who managed the council’s Internet sites, telecommunications, and press releases. “You are forgiven, Bilaal,” he said with a crooked grin, waving the young man inside. “Come. I am anxious to finish this.”
While Bilaal settled in at the conference table and powered up his laptop, Ghalib set beside him the mini DVD from his digital camcorder and the slim removable hard drive from the Dome of the Rock’s surveillance system.
“I need both of these on one disc—this one first,” Ghalib instructed him, pointing to the hard drive. “You can splice the videos, yes?”
“I can do anything you want,” he assured Ghalib.
Standing with arms folded tight, Ghalib watched over the tech’s shoulder.
Bilaal fished a USB cable from his bag and used it to connect the hard drive to his laptop. Then he activated a video editing program and accessed the files on Ghalib’s hard drive. “We’ll run through the video first. Then you tell me what you want to do.”
“Remember, Bilaal. You are not to tell anyone about this. Do you understand?” Ghalib warned him.
As he looked up at the Keeper’s baleful expression, an uneasy feeling came over Bilaal. “You have my word.”
Back on the screen, nine video clips simultaneously came to life in a neat three-by-three grid. The tech immediately recognized the various vantage points—all interior shots of the Dome of the Rock. He tried to recall if he’d ever seen cameras inside the shrine, but nothing came to mind.
Bilaal initiated playback.
On-screen, two plainclothes Palestinians anxiously paced the shrine’s dim ambulatory with semiautomatic machine guns, slipping out of o
ne camera frame and into another. On the audio tracks, all was silent except for their bare feet plodding along the ornate Persian carpet and their heavy breathing. Camera nine provided an unchanging view of the empty cave beneath the rock—the Well of Souls.
When Bilaal studied the tiny date stamp and running clock in the lower right corner of each video window, his muscles went rigid. These were the minutes preceding the nasty firefight that had taken place at the shrine only three days ago. He’d only heard shocking rumors about the siege. But none included these armed men—these Muslims—being inside the shrine just before it all went down.
Ghalib bent and whispered, “We’ll need to delete these scenes. Understand?”
“I understand,” he tremulously replied.
“Now move it ahead about twenty minutes.”
With shaking fingers, Bilaal sent the recordings into fast-forward.
The video counter spun wildly for a few seconds. “Ah! There! Stop there.”
Bilaal clicked on the play button. The two gunmen were now screaming back and forth to one another, agreeing to immediately begin shooting the moment anyone entered the shrine. They shouted out blessings to one another as well as praise for being chosen as martyrs. Seconds later, creaking hinges made the two gunmen retreat and take positions with their weapons trained on the shrine’s southern doors.
“Now watch, Bilaal.” Grinning, Ghalib eased back and folded his arms. “We begin here.” Ghalib tapped the images captured by camera one: doors slowly parting, moonlight spilling in through the opening.
Bilaal leaned closer to try to discern the dark silhouettes that appeared in the shrine’s doorway, but he couldn’t make out any of it. Then something completely unexpected happened. In chorus, all nine video frames filled with static as the feeds went off-line.
“What the—”
“What did you do there?” Ghalib snapped. “Fix that.”
As he shrank in his chair, Bilaal’s fingers worked feverishly at the keyboard, rewinding, fast-forwarding. Ghalib’s sharp chin was practically resting on his left shoulder, so close he could feel the Keeper’s hot breath on his neck.
After the fourth attempt, the static still came back.
“What did you do?” he hissed, nostrils flaring.
“I—I—” Bilaal was shaking his head in bewilderment, holding his hands out at the screen. “Nothing. I swear. It’s the recordings. They just ... They stop.”
“Impossible! I watched it all happen! I watched everything through those cameras!” Ghalib slammed a hand down on the table beside him. “Did you erase the files?” Crazed, he jabbed an index finger at the tech’s face. “Tell me you didn’t erase them, Bilaal!”
He cowered in his chair. “This isn’t something I could’ve done. You’ve been watching me this whole time. I could not have . . .” He kept shaking his head. “I erased nothing— I swear it!”
Over the next hour, Ghalib kept at it with Bilaal, going over the corrupted footage again and again . . . and again. Bilaal adjusted settings, tested the connection, swapped cables, ran diagnostics on the hard drive. Yet each time, at the very moment the shrine’s doors opened, the static would take over. For good measure, Bilaal went through the entire process again using a second laptop that was his backup.
Same thing. Static.
Finally, dripping with sweat and pale as goat’s milk, Bilaal tried to play back the footage Ghalib had shot with his own camcorder. That’s when something even more astounding appeared—more static. The entire disc had been wiped out.
“What are you doing!” Ghalib erupted. “See what you’ve done now! What have you done!”
But after he saw the inexplicable fate of the second disc, Bilaal’s demeanor had changed dramatically. The man was spooked. “What happened to these videos,” he calmly replied, shaking his head slowly and steadily, “I cannot explain it. I can only take your word that there were videos here. But if there were pictures on these discs . . . and now they have been erased without explanation . . . ,” he weakly replied. “Then with all respect, I must ask something of you, Ghalib. Perhaps the same question Allah might ask.”
“What might that be?” Ghalib growled.
“What have you done?”
94
******
Rome
The sterile corridors of the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic were a stark reminder of an alternate fate that might have befallen Charlotte Hennesey. Behind every door of the critical care wing, Death was patiently waiting.
Knowing that she’d been endowed with the ability to change the fate of so many was overwhelming. There was no guarantee that she could reverse the damage of every malady. But ALS would certainly be considered one of the toughest, and she’d handled that one swimmingly. According to the Gospels, the laundry list of Jesus’s healings included the lame, the crippled, the paralyzed, lepers, the deaf, the mute, and the blind. Of course, there were His multiple exorcisms too. Not to mention the granddaddy of them all: raising the dead. What was Charlotte Hennesey supposed to do about that one? How dead was dead? Was there a limited window of time to repair the effects of death? Regardless, it was already too late for Evan. His body had been cremated the same morning her abductors had flown her to Israel.
“Permesso!” a loud voice called from behind.
Startled, Charlotte immediately quickstepped to the wall. “Sorry.” A quintet of paramedics and doctors sped past with a stretcher between them. Their neat formation—two on each side, one at the rear—brought to mind Olympic bobsledders. The poor man laid out on the cushion, bare from the waist up, had suffered terrible burns to the chest, arms, and face. His eyes were wide open in shock, limbs twitching.
The tremendous urge to stop them, to intervene, to lay her hands on the poor man, was agonizing. Breathless, she watched the triage unit disappear behind the burn unit’s mechanized double door at the end of the corridor.
The raw emotions tugging at her made her feel like a drug addict undergoing withdrawal. It got her thinking about how Jesus came to cope with all this. Had he been scared too? Had he had doubts that he was worthy of such a thing? After all, though God may have touched Him, He still had been human. Did He also feel lonely, lost, and confused? How did Jesus choose who to heal, how many to heal?
Such power could provoke so many different responses, from full-blown magnanimity to runaway misanthropy—perhaps even delusional mania. No doubt she needed guidance, temperance . . . faith. But where was she supposed to find the right answers? This wasn’t exactly suitable material for psychoanalysis.
That’s when she knew that the best place to begin was here, in Rome. Get it together.
A young woman in sky-blue scrubs came over from the nurse’s station.
The garments’ color had Charlotte flashing back to the robe that had once covered the egomaniacal misanthrope who’d been reduced to ashes at the foot of the Ark of the Covenant.
A quick glance at Charlotte’s YMCA duffel bag confirmed the nurse’s hunch that Charlotte was a fellow American.
“Are you all right?” the nurse said in English with a heavy New England accent.
“Yes.” Charlotte took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
“Sorry you had to see that,” she said, motioning with her eyes to the burn unit. “The toughest cases come through these doors. Takes some getting used to.”
“Think he’ll make it?”
The nurse’s head tipped sideways. “We have to believe he will. Sometimes, when you think there’s no hope”—she shrugged and smiled—“you get a surprise.”
The nurse’s eyes went down to the yellow laminated visitor’s pass Charlotte was holding.
“Who are you here to see?”
“Patrick Donovan.”
“Ah,” she said. “He’s one of mine. I thought he had no family.”
“He does now,” Charlotte gently replied.
“Really nice of you to visit. Come, he’s just down the hall. I’ll take you to him.”
<
br /> Charlotte walked beside the nurse.
“How is he?”
The nurse’s sorrowful gaze turned to her.
“Not so well, I’m afraid. Lots of trauma to the chest. If he makes it through the next few days, he stands a good chance of pulling through. He’s a real fighter.” She flashed an encouraging smile and said, “I have a feeling he’ll surprise us.”
Suddenly, she pulled Charlotte to the wall as a cardiac team came racing around the corner pushing a defibrillator. Another race against time and flesh. She could feel Death grinning.
“Sorry,” the nurse said. “There’s another reason we call them ‘crash carts.’ ”
They continued down the corridor.
“You might not like what you’re going to see,” the nurse apologetically explained. “Since he’s not breathing on his own, we’ve got him on a ventilator. Lots of tubes in his chest and throat. For the time being, we have him under heavy sedation.”
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