The Lucifer Genome: A Conspiracy Thriller

by Glen Craney

  “I’m telling you, he’s on us like stink on … everything in this place.”

  “He’s Hasidic. Ultra-Orthodox. Wing-nut conservative.”

  “So?”

  “He’s a religious cop, kinda like a Kosher Kojak. This is the seventh year in the Israeli agricultural cycle. These high-octane Orthodox rabbis try to enforce a Biblical injunction that all farmland should lie fallow every seventh year. These guys snoop around places like this, trying to pick up evidence that the injunction is being violated. They get a commission, like bounty hunters.”

  Unconvinced, Marly debated a wager. “You really want to sleep with me?”

  Cas stopped so fast that his cowboy hat nearly tippled over his nose. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Cas curled a slow, self-satisfied grin. “Was my little performance on the Good Ship Lollipop that impressive?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “Well, then why the sudden offer? Especially after all the rejections?”

  Marly kept walking. “I’m a gambler at heart. I trade rocks on the open market, remember? I’ve developed a second sense about motives and intentions. If that man in black isn’t tracking us, then I’ll be your love slave tonight.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “If I’m right, we split the loot sixty-forty. And I don’t need to tell you who gets the sixty.”

  Cas debated her challenge, his lower anatomy fighting a tug-of-war with his brain. “How are we going to prove his intentions?”

  “Just go up and ask him.”

  Cas howled and slapped his hand against a pen railing, drawing stares from the ranchers and business types. When he stopped laughing, he edged closer and took a whiff of her tantalizing feminine allure, a welcome respite from the acrid odors of the exchange. He whispered into her ear, “Geez, you’ve got a lot to learn about surveillance work. You don’t just go up and ask a trail what they’re—”

  Marly spun on her heels and walked right up to the Hasidic Jew. “Are you following us?”

  The Hasid waited until another auction scrum drew the interest of virtually everyone in the yards. Then, when the bidders were looking in the other direction, he made a quick jerk of his head for Marly to follow him into a room that the auctioneers used to negotiate deals.

  Stunned, and more than a little disappointed, Cas skulked into the room behind them.

  The Hasidic man shut the door and locked it.

  Marly set her hands on her hips. “Well?”

  The Hasid turned to Cas and, after a hesitation, spoke English with a thick Semitic accent. “You have been telling people here that you breed red heifers.”

  “Yeah,” Cas said, sounding less than believable.

  The Hasid stared at Cas, clearly not buying the claim. “You will not find here what you seek.”

  Cas jerked his head closer. “Oh? And what am I looking for?”

  The Hasid neither moved nor spoke, letting the silence do the work for him.

  Finally, Cas took a step forward, until he was nose to nose with the man. “Let’s try this one. Where will I find what I’m looking for?”

  The Jew pulled a business card from his vest and handed it to him. “Call this number. Tell the person who answers that Reb Chaim Sharon sent you.”

  Before Cas and Marly could get out another question, the Hasid left the room and disappeared into the auction crowds.

  Cas stared at the business card. Incredulous, he showed it to her. While she examined it, he asked, “What are you thinking?”

  She closed her eyes and brought her fingers to the side of her head, as if conjuring a clairvoyant vision. Her eyes flashed open, staring at his crotch. “I’m thinking of a number.”

  Cas grinned on seeing the direction of her gaze, exhilarated with the certainty that she had finally succumbed to his charms. “Eight inches?

  “I’m thinking a little higher.”

  He straightened with surprise and thrust out his chest. “Wow. That’s what I’m talkin’ about! A woman who rounds up.”

  “More like sixty-forty.”

  “That’s not a number!” he protested.

  She slapped him on his wallet and walked off. “It will be.”

  IN THE JEWISH QUARTER OF Jerusalem’s Old City, a young rabbinical student with a patchy beard led Cas and Marly into a darkened office next to the Hurva Synagogue.

  As the door closed behind them, Cas checked the phone number on the Hasid’s business card again, perplexed why they had been led here. A single bulb flicked on overhead, and in the hazy light, he could just make out an old rabbi with unruly whiskers hunched over a desk in the corner. The cleric’s face, so lean and drawn that he looked like a bent baguette crowned with a yarmulke, bobbed inches from an open tome. He made odd noises through his nose as he traced the lines of what he was reading from right to left. After watching this ritual for nearly a minute, Cas cleared his throat, suspecting that the wizened rabbi was too blind to see them come in.

  The rabbi did not look up from his study. “You possess red heifers.”

  Cas glanced around, wondering if Isserle and his Mossad cronies had set him up with this meeting for a prank. “Maybe. Who wants to know?"

  Only then did the rabbi turn from his book. He glared at Cas with currant eyes fierce enough to have turned Moses to stone. “Tell me.” He spoke with an ominous, slow pace. “Are you the American who conspires with the Zionists?”

  Cas stole an alarmed glance at Marly, wondering what the rabbi was talking about. He was now having second thoughts about following up on the mysterious tip that the Hasid had given them at the auction. But on a hunch, he asked the rabbi, “This American you speak of … is he from Texas, by any chance?”

  “Texans are slant drillers,” the rabbi said.

  Cas was even more baffled by that enigmatic declaration. “I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

  The elderly rabbi wrapped his shriveled shoulders tighter with his shawl and motioned them closer to ease the effort on his withered voice. “I once asked our prime minister what he thought of your former President Bush. He told me that Texans are slant drillers. I was hoping you might translate this explanation for me.”

  Cas shrugged. “Texans will cheat a rock. That’s about all I know of the damn bast—”

  Marly kicked his boot, trying to silence him before he could offend the rabbi with his coarseness.

  The rabbi, taking the inference, nodded. “There are rumors of a man from Texas who has bred a pure, unblemished red heifer.”

  That bit of information spiked the pulse in Cas’s temples. “I think we know just the guy you’re talking about.”

  “You are a commercial competitor with this man?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Cas said. “I gotta come clean, Rabbi, you being a man of the cloth and all. I don’t breed red heifers. I don’t breed anything but a little contempt from time to time.”

  “Amen to that,” Marly muttered.

  Cas glared at her, then turned back to the rabbi and went on with his confession. “We’ve been trying to get our hands on this Texas con man who’s apparently breeding red heifers for God-knows-what reason. We’re just trying to find out what he’s up to.” He hesitated, figuring the story wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the cleric. “He cheated us out of some big-time money.” He paused again, looked down at his boots and shuffled. “To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m here even talking to a clergyman about cattle-breeding. The guy we’re after is named Cohanim. All’s I really know is that he’s a world-class slimeball. He’ll do anything for a buck.”

  The rabbi poured himself a cup of tea. “Greed is not your Texan’s vice.”

  Cas checked Marly from his periphery, now more confused than ever. He asked the rabbi, “How do you figure that?”

  “Are you a godly man?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I was.”

  The rabbi nodded in admiration at the honesty. He reached for his copy of the Torah a
nd opened it to a page. He handed the book to Marly. “My eyes have only a few lines left in them. Would you read from Numbers, Nineteen: Two?”

  Marly took the book, which she knew from her bible studies was the same as the Christian Old Testament. She found an English translation of the Hebrew on the margin, and read it aloud: “‘Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke.’”

  She stole a stunned glance at Cas, and could have hung hangers on his gaping mouth.

  Nodding at their stunned reactions, the rabbi explained the passage. “The animal must not have hairs of any other color, it must be in perfect health, and it must never have been used to perform work.” He gestured for her to continue reading from the Numbers chapter.

  Marly found her place again. “‘The Lord said to Moses and Aaron: This is a requirement of the law that the Lord has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke. Give it to Eleazar the priest; it is to be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence. Then Eleazar the priest is to take some of its blood on his finger and sprinkle it seven times toward the front of the tent of meeting. While he watches, the heifer is to be burned—its hide, flesh, blood and intestines. The priest is to take some cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer.’”

  Falling silent, she reread one of the lines to herself:

  The heifer is to be burned.

  “Rabbi, let’s cut to the chase here,” Cas said. “What’s all this heifer-burning stuff really about?”

  The rabbi bowed his head as if to negate the blasphemy. “The Temple cannot be restored until the ashes of a pure red heifer are again procured.”

  Marly suddenly understood what that girl in Texas had witnessed.

  The rabbi allowed the revelation to sink in. “We have waited centuries for the red heifer to arrive. But while we leave its timing to God, others are not so patient. Some are now trying to manufacture this beast—this precondition of the Messiah—by artificial means. They who attempt such a thing will produce only abomination and evil.”

  Cas waited for an explanation, at a loss about what any of this could have to do with Seth Cohanim and his breeding scheme.

  Marly couldn’t hide the excitement in her voice. “Cohanim wants to restore the Jerusalem Temple. Just as it existed in the Old Testament. He just can’t do it without the ashes of a red heifer. Says so right here in the Bible. Now, he has the ashes, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Cas said. “Why would a Texas rancher want to rebuild a Jewish temple? The guy’s as Christian as the Cross.”

  The rabbi’s bagged eyes became even sadder. “Certain American denominations believe that your Christ will not return to Earth until King Solomon’s Temple is rebuilt. And only then after a great battle is fought between the Messiah and the Antichrist.”

  The rabbi’s explanation rattled something loose deep in Marly’s brain. “That ranch girl in Llano said Cohanim brought along a strange-looking man dressed in black when he burned the calf.”

  Cas nodded, finally following her line of thought. He asked the rabbi, “Do any Jews in Israel work with these Christian groups?”

  The rabbi lowered his head to deliver a shameful admission. “A splinter sect of my faith has sold its soul to them. These Jews now conspire with your fundamentalist Christians for their own ends. They take blood money from these people in the United States to help bring about the conditions for the rebuilding of the Temple. These Christians use my Jews for their own means while all along expecting them to be cast into Hell when the Messiah finally comes.”

  Cas wondered if Marly was thinking the same thing: What could the Black Stone of Mecca possibly have to do with Seth Cohanim and his obsession to breed red heifers to restore the Jerusalem Temple? Before he could pose that conundrum, the door cracked open.

  The student who had escorted them into the office told his superior, “Rebbe, your next appointment is here.”

  The rabbi grasped the hands of his two American guests in a fretful farewell. “Zay Gezunt,” he said, offering the traditional blessing for good health. “You must be careful. Such a man who would usurp God’s prerogative will stop at nothing to see his demented creation manifested.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Galilee, Northern Israel

  LEAVING JERUSALEM WITH MARLY IN the middle of the night, Cas raced their rental car up Route 918 along the Golan Heights and crossed into occupied Lebanese territory. Earlier that afternoon, after snooping around Haifa University’s science halls, they had picked up on a bit of interesting academic gossip: An unidentified American man with deep pockets had reportedly built a state-of-the-art laboratory in a kibbutz near the northern border.

  Worth a shot, considering they had no other leads.

  Cas slowed down, knowing that a speeding vehicle was a prime target for skittish military patrols. “You sure this is the right place?”

  Marly consulted the map again. “Shaaba Farms. Should be just up ahead.”

  Cas drove through a dusty field of orange groves and pulled into a graveled lane. The entrance to the kibbutz was gated and locked. Signs featuring angry stick men armed with machine guns made clear that trespassing would not be dealt with lightly.

  “Maybe we should have called first,” Marly said.

  “Sure,” Cas said, sarcastically. “‘Hello, we just happen to be in the ’hood. We’d love to drop in and ask a few questions about a total nut job named Seth Cohanim. He’s a hyper-religious psycho who’s gone global and may be balls deep in some nefarious shenanigans.’”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m sure the right-wing settlers around here would be delighted to accommodate a couple of strangers asking about their business dealings.”

  “Okay, smart guy. What do we do now that we’re out here in this giant sandbox?”

  Cas looked down the shimmering highway and noticed two hikers with backpacks shuffling wearily along the shoulder. The boy wore blue jeans and a kippah skullcap, and the girl wore a scarf and a calico dress that reached to her ankles. They had the confused look of American students just arrived in the country. Going with his guess, he rolled down the window and shouted at them, “Shalom!”

  The two hikers stopped, their faces set with suspicion.

  “You are here to work at the kibbutz, no?”

  When the boy finally gave up a hesitant nod, Cas snapped his fingers for Marly to hand over her notebook. He got out of the car and pretended to check a roster on one of the notebook pages. “Afrom … Maschel … Baruch … Are you Resnick and Fleischer from New York University?”

  The two students looked at each other, puzzled. Finally, the boy said, “No, I am Aaron Katz. This is my girlfriend, Sonia Furst. We are juniors at Stanford.”

  Cas flipped a couple of pages deeper into the notebook. “Katz and Furst! There you are. A day early!”

  Now even more confused, the boy riffled through his travel papers, trying to find his start date. “We were told to arrive today.”

  “Hey, no sweat,” Cas said. “We’ll find you bunks. I’ll just need to check your personal belongings. You’ve probably already been told that our security measures are pretty tight here. You understand, of course. Your backpacks and headgear, please. And I’ll need your letters of admission to the kibbutz.”

  The coed didn’t look pleased. “How long will this take?”

  “No more than an hour,” Cas promised. “I’ll try to expedite the processing. There’s a restaurant about a mile down the road, that way.” He pulled a few shekels from his pocket and gave them to the boy. “Go have an espresso. Compliments of Shaaba Farms. I’ll come pick you up when we get everything squared away.”

  The students reluctantly handed over their belongings and began walking down the road. When they were out of sight, Cas jumped back into the c
ar and turned down the lane leading to the kibbutz. A hundred yards from the entrance, he stopped again and handed Marly the female student’s scarf. “You live in New York. You should be able to fake a little Hebrew.”

  Grinning, Marly babbled gibberish, “Ye` ikh aroyszogn em zeyer gezun.”

  Cas tried on the boy’s skullcap. “That’s my little siksa.”

  A mile farther down the road, he stopped the car on the shoulder. He and Marly got out, slipped on the backpacks, and walked down the rutted lane to the kibbutz’s security kiosk. Practicing his shtick, Cas offered his hand to her in a mock greeting, “Hi, I’m Aaron Katz. I decided to go back to school and get my degree after ’Nam. This whole Holy Land scene rocks big time, yo.”

  Marly rolled her eyes and wondered again about her updated life expectancy, now that she had been drawn back into Cas Fielding’s dangerous orbit.

  AFTER PASSING THROUGH THE LOCAL security with no trouble, Marly and Cas walked down the main street of the kibbutz and checked out the barracks. The students and residents had just finished breakfast and were filing out of the dining hall into the clear morning heat. A few gave them quizzical looks, no doubt wondering why such an odd couple was here.

  Near the end of the main street, Cas spotted a newer building that had a bright red plastic disposal container for biomedical waste sitting near its door. He whispered, “Target locked.”

  “We’d better wait until night,” Marly muttered, covering her mouth.

  “That would be a nugatory.”

  “You mean ‘negatory,’ you pseudo-Zionist buffoon,” she muttered through set teeth. “‘Nugatory’ is the word that describes your level of intelligence.”

  Cas shrugged off the Scrabble lesson and led her on an indirect route toward the building, to avoid anyone’s notice. As they strolled past the entrance, he jiggled the knob and found it locked. No surprise there. He kept walking around the building, glancing at the windows covered with black drapes.