by By Jon Land
here am I?” Ben asked when a man he recognized as Commissioner David Vordi of Israel’s National Police entered the windowless room.
“The Megrash Haruseim police station in Jerusalem. A cell held for only the best your people have to offer,” Vordi said smugly. “I’ve heard it was reserved for Arafat when we were considering taking him into custody.”
Ben had just awakened for the second time to find himself lying on an aged cot in what he now realized must have actually been a cell that smelled of must and mold. He had noticed upon first waking hours before that the various glass wounds he had received at the Qalqiliya Zoo had been neatly stitched and bandaged. And he was wearing fresh clothes that smelled of some flowery laundry detergent.
“Why am I being held here?” Ben demanded.
Vordi held his ground. “You’re not. I’m here to release you into the custody of your own organization.”
“Release me?”
“Immediately.”
“You have no questions?” Ben asked, utterly bewildered.
“None I expect you’d be able to answer.”
“Then let me ask you one: what have you learned about the three men I killed at the zoo?”
“What three men?”
“The ones your soldiers found me standing over when they arrested me!”
Vordi frowned. “We found the bodies of Samuel Barr and six of his associates. That’s all.”
Ben stood up slowly, his muscles rebelling even at the slight motion. “What’s going on here?”
“You’re being released. You should be happy.”
“Why are you covering this up? Who’s pulling strings?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t want to know what I was doing at the zoo.”
“I don’t care.”
But Ben continued anyway. “I had come there to meet Sammy Barr. He was going to turn over to me the leaders of an outpost militia responsible for the Bureij massacre.”
“There’s a U.N. car waiting for you outside. . . .”
“Listen to me, Vordi! Sammy Barr must’ve had it all wrong. This outpost militia had nothing to do with the massacre. The real party behind the massacre set everything up so the militia group would be blamed. Then they blew up that bus to cover their tracks. And when Sammy Barr tried to trap the parties responsible, he had to die too.”
Vordi started to back out of the cell and beckoned Ben to join him. “This sounds like a U.N. problem. You can explain everything to your superiors. General Arguayo, for one, is very interested in talking to you. He sounded extremely upset.”
Ben held his ground. “What is it you don’t want me to find out?”
“Let’s go, Inspector. Your car’s waiting.”
A trio of armed guards escorted Ben from the jail to a parking lot outside. He squinted at the sudden exposure to sunlight, feeling his eyes water. He moved gingerly, the effects of the battle last night making themselves felt, it seemed, in every muscle. There was nowhere he didn’t hurt, and the areas Israeli doctors had stitched while he was unconscious had begun to throb as well.
A minivan with U.N. markings sat idling between twin rows of cars. One of the soldiers opened the rear door and stepped back so Ben could enter. Still perplexed by the inexplicable turn of events, he climbed inside and watched the door slide closed behind him.
A man wearing the white uniform of a United Nations peacekeeper smiled from the seat next to him. In the front sat a driver and a second peacekeeper, his body angled so he could watch Ben.
“Good morning, Inspector Kamal,” he said. “On behalf of General Arguayo, we apologize for not being able to expedite your release earlier. The general is in Brussels. A plane is waiting to take you there.”
“I need to speak with him now,” Ben insisted.
“In time, Inspector.”
Ben was aware the van had started moving, edging into traffic on Jaffa Road and then crawling along in maddening stops and starts. “It’s imperative that I make contact with Inspector Barnea, then. I need a phone.”
The man in the front passenger seat exchanged a glance with the man sitting next to Ben in the back. “We are not authorized to allow you to contact anyone until you speak with General Arguayo.”
“How did he arrange for my release?”
“We know only our own instructions, Inspector.”
Ben shrugged, prepared to let it go for now, until the man in the front seat shifted his body back around, inadvertently revealing a semiautomatic pistol holstered on his belt. Strictly against the U.N.’s operating procedure inside Israel, and grounds for expulsion. Ben glanced at the man sitting next to him and saw a similar bulge along his right hip.
Something was wrong.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Ben said. “Pull over, please.”
The driver looked to the man in the front seat, then slid toward the curb without waiting for instruction.
“Hurry,” Ben urged, his hand feeling for the door handle.
The minivan nosed into a space too small to accommodate its full size and halted. Ben yanked on the latch, about to push open the door when the man next to him threw a hand across Ben’s body and held the door closed. In the front seat, the man in the passenger seat had pulled his jacket aside, hand buried near his hip as he spoke, trying to sound reassuring.
“Maybe we should wait until—”
Ben smashed the man next to him in the face with an elbow, catching him totally by surprise. He felt the bridge of the man’s nose shatter on impact as his head snapped backward. In the front seat, the driver was trying to twirl around, fighting the confines of his shoulder harness, and the passenger next to the driver had managed to free his pistol.
Ben threw himself across the console, between the two men in the front seat, and jammed a hand downward against the wrist of the passenger as he angled the gun forward. A shot exploded and Ben felt the heat of the bullet, actually felt it, surge past his ear. A thump and a gasp followed, the bullet having torn a hole in the driver’s chest. The driver looked down at the wound in astonishment before his head sank and he slumped in his seat.
The passenger tried to right the pistol again, and this time Ben used his free hand to slam the man’s head sideward into the window, which spider-webbed on impact. Ben rotated his fingers upward, digging them into the man’s eyes. The man wailed, relinquishing grasp of the pistol long enough for Ben to tear it free and hammer him in the face with both hands. Then he pulled himself back into the minivan’s rear and jerked open the door.
He sensed movement next to him and instinctively tumbled from the car onto the pavement. The man in the rear seat he had smashed with his elbow fired three shots in rapid succession, shattering the window. Ben leaped to his feet and dove over the hood of a passing car as it screeched to a halt, then skirted between the bumpers of another pair of cars mired in traffic.
He was vaguely conscious of more gunshots spitting through the air, but kept moving forward. Staying low and using the wedged-in cars for cover until he came to an intersection. Ben darted down the cross street toward an open-air market beyond.
He had just crossed into the reach of the sunlight when a trio of Israeli soldiers spun round the corner before him, assault rifles leveled.
“Hands in the air!” one shouted. “Drop to your knees! Do it wow!”
Ben did as he was told, the scene oddly familiar to the one played out in the zoo’s exhibit hall just a few hours earlier. But this time Ben heard a fresh set of footsteps approach from the rear, followed suddenly by an all-too-familiar voice.
“You can get up now, Inspector,” said David Vordi.
* * * *
Chapter 50
D
anielle had tried to reach Ben on his cell phone right up until her flight boarded to no avail, his voice mail triggered before it even rang, indicating the phone was switched off or somewhere lacking service. The trip to Berlin, to see the man Walter Henley had
identified as an expert on Nostradamus, would be long and arduous, taking up the bulk of an entire day. That suited Danielle just fine, since it would give her ample time to catch up on her rest, if she could.
She had mounted several more attempts to dig her way through the tunnel to reach Henley, but it was no use. The force of the explosions from John Henry Phills’s cabin had collapsed the walls as well as the ceiling. Even if she could have gotten to him, too much time had elapsed to give him any reasonable chance at survival. She had abandoned the task reluctantly and hiked down to the main road where a passing trucker picked her up only a mile into her walk.
He had dropped her off at a roadside motel that consisted of tiny individual cabins usually reserved for hunters and campers in season. Off season, the motel remained virtually vacant. She had remained at the motel only long enough to shower and sleep for a few hours. With no fresh clothes, she had no choice but to once again don the ones hopelessly soiled by the trek through the tunnel, despite her efforts to brush and clean them. And, with no means of transportation readily available, she had no choice other than to steal a car parked in front of a door three cabins down.
Danielle drove straight to Dulles Airport. Booking the appropriate flights meant dealing with reservations clerks who would certainly note her haggard and unkempt appearance. So she did her best to replace her soiled clothes with new ones purchased at shops along the airport concourse. Then she used a stall in the ladies’ room to change and pull her hair back into a ponytail.
Danielle’s sole luggage once the flight boarded was a backpack in which she’d stuffed Walter Henley’s lockbox. The original manuscript was inside, contained in a sealed pouch, along with the translation coded to the individually labeled quatrains. Information on Klaus Hauptman, the man she was going to Germany to meet, was inside as well, along with a pair of unmarked CD-ROM discs that could only be the translation software created by Henley’s son.
She had always considered the apparent success of Nostradamus’s predictions to be the result of so-called experts analyzing prophecies so general in nature they could be interpreted to mean almost anything. That, though, was no longer the issue here. The issue was that the existence of someone’s plot had been revealed, threatened to the point where multiple murders became the only way to safeguard its continuance.
In an age of two’s four, in a land of many
An army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark
Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal
Three of the four lines were intact. And if Danielle could uncover the fourth, then the plot in its entirety might be revealed and somehow preempted.
When sleep failed to come on the first leg of the flight, Danielle busied herself with a more careful reading of the rest of the lost prophecies, as much out of curiosity as anything. True to Henley’s claims, the translations obtained through his son’s linguistics software revealed a significant number of predictions that were clear in their meaning and even clearer in their accuracy. So much of recent history was contained here. Many of the prophecies seemed innocuous, yes, and others were too convoluted to decipher totally. At best, open to interpretation; at worst, so vague they could be applied to any number of occurrences. But Danielle’s eyes kept coming back to a number of quatrains that, considered in the context of Henley’s code, clearly foretold some of the most striking events in recent memory, not to mention one that might be soon to join them.
... a darkness will reign eternal. . .
And she had only five days left to stop it.
* * * *
Chapter 51
W
e have much to discuss, Inspector Kamal,” Commissioner of National Police David Vordi greeted, as he ushered Ben into the spacious office on the limestone building’s fourth floor. Ben watched him place a manila envelope atop the desk and then take a seat behind it.
Ben shifted his chair to better face Vordi. “What’s going on?” He had first met Danielle Barnea in this very office and had not set foot in it since, which only added to his discomfort and confusion.
“I sent the officers in the alley to follow the van that picked you up outside National Police.”
“Why?”
“To protect you, Inspector.”
“Try again, Commissioner.”
Vordi’s expression didn’t change. “They were three cars back when the fight broke out in your U.N. vehicle. I’m assuming your United Nations escorts provoked your actions.”
“Two of the men were armed. Strictly against U.N. procedure.”
“What else?”
“That’s all.”
“You’re holding something back.”
“And if I was, why would I share it with you?”
“Because this time, you should have realized by now, we’re on the same side.”
“Is that what you said to Danielle to get her to come back?”
“Don’t blame me for the problems Commander Barnea encountered upon her return, Inspector,” Vordi said, staring Ben straight in the eye.
Ben gazed around him dramatically. “This was supposed to be her office, not yours.”
“Believe me, Inspector, I wish it were. Because in that case I would now be minister of justice.”
“She spurned your advances and you made her life miserable. I’d say you got what you deserved.”
“Danielle didn’t need me to make her life miserable. The two of you seemed remarkably adept at managing that much completely on your own.”
“You sound jealous.”
“I’ve known her a lot longer than you have, Inspector. Danielle chose you because in her heart she knows you’re someone whom she can never truly have. That’s what I meant about her not needing my help to be miserable.” Vordi raked the bushy hair from his forehead. “But for now you need to reconsider where you place your trust. It’s your own people in the United Nations who appear to want you dead, not me.” The commissioner of National Police leaned forward and crossed his hands over the desk blotter. “You asked me what I wasn’t telling you about the incident in the zoo earlier. I told you there was nothing.”
“Keep talking.”
“That was a lie. We were able to identify the three men you killed: all members of the former Iraqi Special Republican Guard. The Israeli government has extensive files on all of them.”
Ben tried not to show his confusion. “Those men didn’t look like Iraqis. They didn’t look like Arabs.”
“Neither do you, Inspector. But in this case, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because according to our files, all three were dead long before your visit to the zoo.”
“Killed by the Americans in the war,” Vordi continued after a pause long enough for his point to sink in. “Here, see for yourself.” With that, Vordi slid the file folder he’d brought with him across the desk.
Ben opened it, skimmed the file’s contents to satisfy himself that, on paper anyway, Vordi’s claims were substantiated. “But you chose not to tell me this earlier.”
“We believed it was an Israeli problem, Inspector. After all, Sammy Barr and the six men who accompanied him to that zoo were Israeli nationals.”
“The thirty-four victims of the massacre at Bureij weren’t, Commissioner. I was sent here to find their killers.”
“And you’re suggesting these Iraqis were responsible for that as well.”
“It was Barr who suggested it. He thought he was meeting with the leaders of a radical settler militia. I imagine the truth caught him totally by surprise.”
“And what about you, Inspector? Were you taken totally by surprise, or did you recognize those three men you killed at the zoo?”
Ben remained silent.
“Because my guess is they were the ones behind the massacre you were so intent on blaming Israel for. I already proved our innocence to Commander Barnea. Now I find myself doing the same for you.”
�
��And expecting something in return. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“There’s something you need to know. We kept the U.N. team that picked you up in the van waiting outside long enough to match their faces through visual identification software.”
“Don’t tell me: more members of Iraq’s Special Republican Guard. Also listed as deceased.”
“That’s right.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one has heard it from me.”
“You haven’t filed a report?”
