Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Take care,’ I said.

  ‘You too,’ she replied.

  ‘Listen,’ I began. ‘If anything – ’

  She kissed me to stop the dread words coming out.

  ‘I love you,’ I said, and saw the tears spring from her eyes. ‘Hey, hey, hey, come on. I’ve told you that often enough.’

  ‘I know.’ She flicked the tears away with her fingers. ‘It’s just that this time I get the feeling that you mean it.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because I’ve finally understood,’ I said.

  ‘Me too …’ She blinked her eyes dry.

  ‘Good,’ I smiled. ‘Maybe there’s hope for us yet.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe there is.’

  ‘See you, red-eyes.’ I gave her a quick shoulder-hug then closed the hall door and went over to the window, waiting for her to appear in the street below. She looked up as she crossed the sidewalk, blew me a kiss then got into the cab and was carried away down the street.

  When I was all packed, I sealed the tapes of The Man’s conversations in several large buff envelopes along with the NYPD Polaroids and the colour film I had shot of him at Sleepy Hollow, arm in arm with Linda, Gale McDonald and the others, and that I’d put in for processing the day before. And I wondered how Kovacs’s film had turned out.

  Just after midday, the phone rang. It was Gale McDonald. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Had any more thoughts about the weekend?’

  ‘Several,’ she replied. ‘Tell me, how well do you know your secretary?’

  The question caught me by surprise. ‘Linda? Pretty well, I guess. She’s worked with me for a couple of years now. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I’ve been digging around since that brown VW truck with the bum licence plate eavesdropped on our conversation in the coffee shop,’ said McD.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Did you know that she was never employed as a secretary by Universal?’

  ‘Yes, I knew that,’ I said, with a dry laugh. ‘If you dig far enough, you’ll probably find she tried to break into movies and ended up as a party girl. Not exactly the best reference for getting a job with a straitlaced New York law firm.’

  ‘Is that what you think she was doing out there?’ asked McD.

  ‘I really don’t care,’ I replied. ‘All I know is that she can type, spell and is willing to work late.’

  ‘Did you know that she and Peter Kovacs are not brother and sister, but husband and wife?’ said McD.

  The news sent an inexplicable chill up my spine. ‘No, I didn’t. How d’you find that out?’

  ‘I can’t tell you over the phone,’ said McD. ‘But there’s plenty more where that came from. What are you doing right now?’

  I collected my thoughts. ‘I was just about to take a cab into mid-town Manhattan. I have some stuff I want to leave at my bank. Then I was going to grab a quick lunch and go on out to the airport. My plane leaves at four-thirty.’

  She sounded surprised. ‘What, today?’

  ‘Yes. I have to check-in an hour before take-off. When you fly to Israel, they search the bristles on your toothbrush.’

  ‘Okay, listen,’ she said. ‘You know Costello’s?’

  The line went dead.

  I put the phone down and waited for her to call back. Ten minutes later I picked it up to call her at Channel Eight and found myself without a dial-tone. I stopped by the janitor’s office on the way out and used his phone to get through to the operator. She told me that there was a fault on my line and that she would report it. There was no reply from the apartment McD shared with Carol, and when I called the Channel Eight newsdesk, they told me she was out working on a story.

  When I’d been to the bank and stowed the tapes and papers away in my safety deposit box, I dropped my luggage off at the reception desk in the foyer of our office building and took the lift to the twenty-second floor. Joe, fortunately, was out to lunch. The cover was still on Linda’s typewriter. I remembered that I’d told Peter Kovacs she should take Monday off, but today was Tuesday. I used the phone on her desk to call her apartment but it didn’t answer. I toyed with the idea of asking the telephone company to come up with a number for Peter Kovacs, then decided not to bother. I said goodbye to Nancy, our switchboard girl, on the way out and promised to send her a postcard from Bethlehem.

  At Costello’s, I had a word with the three bartenders. None of them had served any single ladies in the past hour and could not recall seeing anyone answering McDonald’s description using the pay-phone. I checked the lunch-tables at the rear, then nursed a large bourbon at the bar for a good forty minutes, getting a crick in the neck through watching the door to the street. At two-thirty I decided that whatever it was she had to tell me would have to wait.

  As I walked back to Third Avenue to get a cab, I saw a brown VW truck parked across the street. I stopped to let a car go past then crossed over to take a look at it. There was a young German shepherd dog sitting in the cab. The side cargo door was open and the back was filled with office stationery that two guys were off-loading into a nearby building. I watched them for a couple of minutes but they didn’t give me a second glance.

  As I reached Third, a cab was just depositing a fare. I rode over to Madison to pick up my luggage then went straight out to Kennedy.

  At Paris, there was a thirty-five minute stop-over to let people on and off and give the Israeli Airline ground staff time to count the wheels. It gave me a chance to stretch my legs in the circular, space-age Charles de Gaulle terminal and appreciate just how goddamn expensive France had become since my last visit. I was tempted to buy Miriam a pint of duty-free Chanel No. 5, then realised it would be safer to pick it up on the return trip.

  When the time came to go back on board, I noticed several new faces in the seats around me. The Franco-American from the Pyrenees with a laundry business in San Francisco had vacated the middle seat, and a lady in her late fifties and a flowered dress, who looked like Golda Meir’s sister, was sitting by the window. The sharp-eyed stocky guy with hairy wrists was still in his seat across the aisle. I gave him a nod as I strapped myself in then sat back with my eyes closed until we had thundered along the runway and angled safely up into the air. Ever since that DC-10 barrel-rolled into the ground at Chicago, I hold my breath until they tuck the flaps in.

  The thunder from the engines eased to a soothing rumble as the guys up front throttled back for the slow climb to altitude. Over the Alps into Northern Italy, down the Adriatic to Greece then across the Mediterranean. In four hours we would land at Tel-Aviv. I checked to see that I didn’t have someone like Sophie Tucker sitting behind me, then let the seat back as far as it would go and crashed out.

  I remember a confused dream. The kind that makes sense at the time but which is impossible to describe. And in it, was the sound of someone screaming. I woke up to find that it was real. As I sat up, a distraught woman with a young child in her arms rushed down the aisle towards the rear of the plane. I put my hands on the seat in front and began to straighten my legs.

  The stocky guy across the aisle snapped at me. ‘Sit down!’

  Which I did.

  As the woman with the child passed me, I peeked around the side of the seat and saw three people, two young men and a woman, standing by the entrance to the First Class section. There was a lot of shouting going on and they were waving their arms around. The cabin staff had disappeared. Then the two young men moved down the port and starboard aisle and I saw they were holding automatic pistols and brandishing a canvas satchel in their other hand. We’d been hijacked.

  Oh, jeezuss, I thought, that’s all I need …

  As the guy moving down our aisle came nearer, I got a better look at him. He had dark hair, hollow cheeks, swarthy complexion and the beginnings of a beard. He looked like a protesting Iranian student but he could have come from anywhere around the southern Meditteranean; Libya, Syria, a PLO training camp – who knows? Maybe you do. I didn’t get a chance to find out.

  ‘N
obody move – hi-jack – ne bougez pas,’ he kept repeating, aiming his pistol along each row of seats and holding up his satchel of grenades, or whatever.

  ‘O, merde,’ growled the woman by the window in a throaty male voice. ‘Encore ces cons d’Arabes…’ And in the next five seconds she told me she’d been at Entebbe.

  I didn’t have time to sympathise. As the hi-jacker passed me, I saw he was trembling. And you can imagine how that made me feel. His companion in the other aisle had paused to shout in Arabic at a protesting passenger. I lay back, clasped my hands together and took a deep, calming breath. Please God, I said to myself, ‘get me out of this in one piece.’

  As I opened my eyes, the stocky guy across the aisle came out of his seat with the speed of a striking cobra, pulling a short-barrelled .38 out of the folded magazine that had been on his lap. Before I had time to react, he shot the guy in the port aisle through the head then whirled round and dropped the hi-jacker who’d gone past us.

  More shouts. A woman somewhere behind me went hysterical. And, as the the two hi-jackers went down, someone up near the front fired several times at the girl. The shots slammed her four different ways against the bulkhead. As she slid to the floor, there was utter confusion as the people near her struggled to get out of their seats, falling over each other in the aisle.

  The stocky Israeli security guard ran towards them. ‘Keep down, keep down! Stay in your seats! Everything’s under – ’

  The rest of his words were lost as he and the people in the front section were engulfed in an orange cloud of fire. There was a thunderous, deafening roar of sound. The shriek of rending metal mixed with the screams of the people in front of me. My brain froze in horror as the orange fireball billowed out towards me, filling the interior of the plane. I turned away from the aisle, throwing myself into the empty middle seat in a vain effort to escape the searing heat – and fell into the arms of The Man.

  And then, although I couldn’t feel his arms around me, I knew we were together. Falling, falling, falling. Then, that first moment of paralysing terror faded away and with it, the sensation of falling. I could no longer feel my body and for an indeterminate moment of time I seemed to float in a formless void. Unsure whether I was still myself, or part of this eventless eternity. Is this death? I wondered. The shadowy spirit-world of Devachan?

  Light pierced the grey fathomless fog that surrounded me. Light, streaming in through my eyes. A fiery pink and orange, streaked with gold. I recoiled and covered my face. Thinking, for a brief instant, that I was still trapped in the explosion aboard the plane. Then, as my eyes snapped into focus, I realised that I was looking up at a dawn sky.

  I lifted my head and saw that I was lying on a hillside dotted with olive trees. The Man stood by my feet, gazing down at me with a strange enigmatic expression. I had the feeling he was trying not to smile. He was dressed in the pale-brown robe he’d worn on his first visit to Sleepy Hollow. A dark-haired woman knelt by my side. He didn’t need to tell me who she was. I could tell from her clothes that it was Mary of Magdala.

  Behind her, night slipped away over the western horizon, leaving layers of wind-smoothed iron-grey cloud piled up like folded prison blankets. I looked the other way and shaded my eyes as the sun came up over the horizon and threw a pattern of light and shade over the roofs and towers of the walled city that straddled the top of the hill on the othe side of the valley. Already, smoke had begun to rise from a thousand cooking fires, and from somewhere higher up the slope behind me I could hear the timeless tinkling of goat-bells.

  I gazed for a moment at the city then looked up at The Man. ‘Is that – ?’

  ‘Yes …’ He leant forward and offered me his hand. ‘Welcome to Jerusalem.’

  I got to my feet and slapped the dust of the Mount of Olives from the seat of my pants. ‘This is not quite what I had in mind.’

  Don’t ask me how it was done. Just take my word for it. What you are reading is all the proof you need. These people can move themselves, and us, through time. But don’t get too excited. A war-games buff will never be able to go back and help Napoleon win the Battle of Waterloo. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t change history when the future is already a part of it. All you can do is play it as written.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked The Man.

  ‘Me? Fine. Tremendous,’ I replied. I didn’t, of course, but what else could I say? I had to look cool, if only for the sake of the twentieth century.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ said The Man. ‘For a moment there, I thought I’d lost you.’

  A jumble of thoughts raced through my head, making my brain buzz as I tried to adjust to this unexpected twist in my travelling arrangements. ‘This may sound a stupid question, but am I dead? Did I die in that hi-jack, and am I imagining all this?’

  The Man shook his head and smiled. ‘No. We brought you here just before death overtook you. You’re alive, Leo. The rest of your time-line has been transferred to the first century.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I sighed heavily. Did you know this was going to happen?’ He didn’t reply. ‘You did, didn’t you? You knew from the very beginning.’

  ‘Not from the very beginning,’ he said. ‘The knowledge was not mine to share but, had you known, it would have changed nothing.’

  ‘But I could have made arrangements,’ I bleated. ‘A will. Jeezuss, I’ve left an eighteen-thousand-dollar car parked in the garage, there’s my apartment, the house at Sleepy Hollow …’

  The Man waved aside my protests. ‘Someone will take care of all that. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got more important things to do.’

  I closed my eyes, breathed hard and prayed for strength. Then I turned to his companion. ‘Excuse me. You must think me very rude.’ I stretched out my hand. ‘Hello. My name is Leo Resnick – but then I guess you already know that.’

  Mary looked at me with brown darting eyes, then turned to The Man, hiding her laughter behind her hand.

  I threw up my hands. ‘She doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.’

  ‘Try it again in Hebrew,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot.’ I ran it through in translation.

  Mary clasped her hands around mine. She was obviously unused to twentieth-century-style handshakes. ‘Welcome to our world, Leo. The Master tells me you come from another time. There will be many things you do not understand but have no fear. I shall be your guide and companion for so long as you have need of me.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I replied, in my second native tongue. I looked down at myself and saw that I was still wearing the shirt and trousers I had boarded the plane with. I’d left my jacket in the overhead luggage locker and my shoes, which I’d kicked off, under the seat in front.

  Mary unwrapped a bundle and pulled out a black and brown striped ankle-length djellaba. The Man handed it to me. ‘Here, put this on. We can’t take you into Jerusalem dressed like that.’

  I pulled the roughly woven robe over my head and wrinkled my nose at the musky animal odour. Mary offered me a pair of crude leather sandals. I stripped off my socks and put them on. ‘How do I look?’

  The Man eyed me critically. ‘Like an Egyptian camel-driver.’

  I guess I deserved that.

  ‘Keep still…’ He placed his hands on either side of my head and fixed me with that golden gaze of his. A swarm of tiny ice-needles zigzagged back and forth through my brain. It lasted for ten, maybe fifteen seconds. At the end of which I discovered that, in addition to Hebrew, I knew how to speak, read and write fluent Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Persian and Coptic – you name it. Pure magic.

  The three of us walked down towards the stream that ran through the Kidron Valley. Even at this distance, I could hear the sounds of the waking city. I turned to The Man. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Ask me anything you want, Leo,’ he said.

  ‘There must have been over two hundred people on board that plane. Are they all dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But don’t worry.
They’ll be back.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But was it necessary to kill two hundred men, women and children just to get me here?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t my doing. Boats sink, cars crash, trains collide, planes fall out of the sky, cities are levelled by earthquakes every day of the week. I don’t make that happen and I can’t stop it. When your time comes, that’s it. Your name was already on that passenger list from the moment you were born. If more people realised that, it might make them love those nearest to them while they are alive instead of weeping over their coffins crippled by remorse.’

  ‘Does Miriam know I’m here?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No. She thinks you died when the plane blew up.’

  ‘But that’s going to make her feel terrible,’ I said. ‘She is going to blame herself for the rest of her life.’

  He smiled. ‘I hope not. Otherwise it means I’ve been wasting my time. Don’t worry. She’s a very strong lady.’

  I imagine he thought that would make me feel better, but let’s face it everybody likes to be missed. It was only fair that Miriam should miss me. Desperately. Later on, of course, I mellowed. But at that moment, I could only cling on to the past, which had yet to happen, and think of what had been taken away from me. Instead of what I had been given.

  My flight had taken off on the 12th of May, 1981. Somewhere along the line I appeared to have lost two weeks of my life because I eventually found that I had landed, if one can use that phrase, on a Wednesday sometime in early June. Preparations were already underway for Shavout, the Feast of the Pentecost, which meant that his disciples had not yet been given the mind-blowing injection of power that, in the following weeks was to amaze and alarm the inhabitants of Jerusalem and provide an unknown student from Tarsus with the opportunity to make a lasting name for himself.

  Why had he brought me here? The answer was simple. I, too, had a mission. To tell his story in the words and images of my generation. I was to be the voice of the future, reaching out from the past. Proof of the Empire’s mastery over Time and Space. To transmit through my feeble glimmer of awareness, the Light of The Word.