The Brotherhood Conspiracy

by Brennan, Terry

  Baruk looked down at the top of his desk as he reached for another pencil. This one he tapped against the top of the desk. The pink eraser bounced off the wood. “That’s a tactic, not a solution,” said Baruk. “It’s an explosion in waiting.”

  “Oh, I have a solution,” said Shomsky, sliding back into his chair. “A solution that will earn your mark in history.”

  Shomsky saw just the hint of a smile cross Baruk’s face. A hardening of the eyes. And Shomsky knew he had pushed the right button.

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Another long day and night, turning into morning, and this one was still not over for Eliazar Baruk. Home in Tel Aviv, in his secret communications room, the strain of eighteen-hour days was draining him of energy and damaging his hope. Now, on top of everything else, was this. Baruk looked once again at the “eyes only” Mossad report in his hand, the one he’d read dozens of times thus far.

  “They intend to take advantage of the situation, exploit the moment,” said Baruk.

  “Your information is solid?” asked the American president.

  “Painter is already sending all our information to Director Cartwright’s secure line. Check it out with your own assets. It’s solid, Jonathan. The Iranian madman is going to make his move sooner than we expected.”

  Baruk watched over the encrypted video link as Jonathan Whitestone, his elbow perched on the bare desk deep in the cellars of the White House, rested his head in the palm of his right hand.

  “He blames me . . . he blames you . . . he blames the world for the loss of the Dome of the Rock,” said Baruk. “But let’s be honest, Jon, he doesn’t need an excuse. His Supreme Council of fanatics will believe anything and do anything President Essaghir says. Believe me, the Iranians are preparing to inflict catastrophic damage on the world’s oil supply and, at the same time, to launch a preemptive strike against Israel. Three weeks from now, during Ramadan.”

  Sleep deprived, Baruk tried to will his body to remain alert, pushing against the gathering gray in his mind as a janitor tries to rustle dust balls into a manageable herd. Even he wondered if he were thinking straight.

  “Are you sure you can take them all out?” asked Whitestone.

  “Sure? Are you kidding? You want a guarantee of certainty, Jonathan?” Baruk could hear the weary edginess to his own voice. “Look, Jon . . . what is certain is the devastation that will result from this Iranian aggression. And we can both be certain of this, also . . . Essaghir must be stopped. How certain am I that our plans will succeed?”

  Baruk threw his shoulders back, desperately trying to shrug off his exhaustion. This job was going to kill him.

  “What other choice do I have? We must strike the Iranians first. And, if we are to strike, it must be decisive and debilitating. Besides you and me, only three of my men know of this plan—Orhlon, Painter, and Sharp. They are confident it will work. We will use their own weapons against them . . . irradiate their nuclear research facility, their petroleum production and pumping facility, and their gold reserves . . . all in one night. No missiles, no smart bombs. Nothing to use as proof on the world stage.”

  On the screen, Whitestone shook his head. “Men on the ground? You believe you can inflict this kind of damage with men on the ground and escape undetected? How, Eliazar? I need to know how you believe your men will get close to these installations.”

  Baruk understood. He was asking the American president to take a great risk and he needed some assurances.

  “Because we have already been there—at all three locations—unnoticed. And we have planted assets at all three. It will be done, Jonathan. But we need you to put a lock on the rest of their funds. We will destroy their capacity for war. We need you to destroy their economy.”

  5

  SUNDAY, JULY 26

  New York City

  The Collector’s Club is closed each Sunday. So Richard Johnson normally had the whole place to himself. He liked it that way. Sunday was the day when he got most of his work done—there were no interruptions. Which is why he was startled this Sunday morning by the interruption sitting on the front steps of the club’s building on East 35th Street.

  “Brandon?” Johnson stood rooted to the sidewalk as he tried to register the unreality of this short, elderly man planted on his steps. An eccentric shock of white hair, as wild as the white-capped surf at the Cliffs of Moher, rioted defiantly on the top of the man’s skull and tossed in the breeze.

  “Ah . . . good morning, Richard. I was hoping you would soon pass by. As me sainted mother would say, ‘Lose an hour in the mornin’ and you’ll be looking for it all day.’ And it’s getting a bit hard on me keister, sittin’ on this stoop.”

  Brandon creaked to his feet and absently brushed the back of his pants with his left hand. He took a step toward Johnson, his right hand extended.

  Dr. Brandon McDonough, provost of Trinity College in Dublin, lecturer emeritus of biblical archaeology. McDonough’s signature facial feature was a nose that wrote the story of his life: flattened by a few too many bustups with the O’Reilly twins; twisted like a mountain highway by too many seasons of rugby; its point painted with an array of purple blotches from too many bouts with “the drink.”

  But neither his iconic Irish appearance nor the heavy brown rims around his glasses could hide the penetrating intelligence that radiated from McDonough. Johnson’s boss when the two men spent their summers at the British Museum, he was one of the few men in the world whom Johnson considered a mentor. Now, here he was, in his ever-present brown tweed suit, his brogue as thick as Irish wool, on a stoop in midtown Manhattan.

  “Brandon, what are you doing here?” Johnson grasped the small man’s warm, gnarly hand. “I’m stunned. Is everything all right?”

  “All right? Good Lord, Richard, everything is lovely.” McDonough, his face the shape of a harvest moon, and his perpetually red cheeks pushed up by the amused smile that seldom left his face, moved forward and placed his left hand around Johnson’s right elbow, not releasing his handshake. “I’m here, my lad, to tell you personally that you have made me so proud. What you accomplished, what you found, ’tis certainly a miracle of the Almighty. My, my, Richard, a wonderful accomplishment.” McDonough’s firm grip delivered more affirmation than any Hallmark card.

  Affirmation that Richard Johnson was incapable of receiving.

  “A wonderful failure, if you were to ask me,” said Johnson, prying his hand from the Irish professor. “Here . . . come inside. I’ll make some coffee and we can sit and talk in comfort.” Johnson steered McDonough up the steps of the Collector’s Club, unlocked the door, and, once inside, shifted the building’s highly sophisticated security system from nighttime surveillance to daytime occupancy. No one ever turned security off at the Collector’s Club. “Come, we’ll go upstairs to my office.”

  “Thank you, Richard. But, lad, tell me,” McDonough said, searching Johnson’s face for understanding, “why is it you believe this great discovery was a failure?”

  Ali Suliman looked over the New York Daily News he held in front of his face. He sat in the early morning sun on a bench outside the bistro on Madison Avenue at 35th Street. Suliman wasn’t there for the sun outside or the Sunday brunch inside the bistro. He was watching the two men who stood huddled together in front of the impressive building on the far side of 35th, across from where he sat.

  The building was his assignment. The men, his prey . . . if they got in the way.

  Suliman put the newspaper on the bench, got up, and walked into the shadows, away from the Collector’s Club. He would be back.

  Johnson led his visitor through the ornate entry hall with its marble floors and columns and into the elevator in the middle of the building.

  There was just enough room for the two men in the antique lift, one of the accoutrements added when Stanford White redesigned the five-story, baroque-style building in the late nineteenth century.

  “It was a failure because the Temple was destroyed before we
could truly examine it.” Johnson opened the door at the fifth floor, led McDonough to the front of the building, and unlocked his office.

  “Is that it, then?” McDonough shook his head and turned to Johnson. “Surely that was a bit of bad luck, I admit. But you didn’t cause that earthquake. What you accomplished was remarkable.”

  Dr. Richard Johnson Sr., former chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University and fellow of the British Museum was now—in his retirement—managing director of the Collector’s Club in Manhattan. The club was one of the most influential in the world of stamp collecting and housed perhaps the most extensive philatelic library on the planet.

  For a man of such lofty credentials and stately bearing, Johnson’s office occupied a lovely but unpretentious space. It contained the obligatory hardwood floor and rich oak bookcases. The weathered, welcoming leather chairs he loved. And a unique, blue Persian rug. But there were no trappings of power. Johnson’s desk was utilitarian. No trophy pictures adorned the walls. No glitz or glamour. It was an academic’s office—in a constant state of barely controlled chaos.

  Johnson was tall, lean, crowned by a thick, silvery-gray mane swept back from his considerable forehead and curling around his ears and shirt collar. Today, his day off, he was wearing a pink, Ralph Lauren golf shirt, well-worn Levis, and a pair of weathered, Bostonian penny loafers. He guided his old friend to one of the leather chairs while he busied himself with brewing the coffee, the velvet enticement of a rich Arabica flirty with brazen promise.

  “Brandon, it sounds so absurd to say this out loud to someone I’ve known for such a long time, but, my colleagues and I . . . we risked our lives while we tried to decipher the message on the scroll.” Johnson turned away from the coffeemaker and took a seat opposite McDonough. “And we risked our lives in a more dramatic and direct way when we did what I can only categorize as a wildly foolish escapade—traveling to Jerusalem to find this lost Temple. We were stalked by a sect of assassins, hunted by Israeli security forces, and targeted by a radical Islamic group hell-bent on protecting the Mount. Just outside this building, one of the finest men I’ve ever known was blown to bits by a car bomb. How the rest of us escaped with our lives, I have no idea.”

  “Aye, and sad it was,” said McDonough. “I know it must—”

  “No. That’s just it, you don’t know,” snapped Johnson. Anxiety was beginning to claw at his chest. “After all we risked, after all we endured, and after all we found . . . to have it all completely destroyed just weeks later has been devastating. I’ve got to admit to you, Brandon, I am frightened to my soul by what I did, and my heart and spirit have been crushed by losing what we fought so hard to gain. For me, it was a disaster. A disaster of epic proportions. I thought . . .”

  Johnson shook his head, emitted a deep sigh, his eyes searching for an answer in the designs of the Persian rug. “I thought, for once, I might help make history.” He looked blankly at the palms of his hands and lost consciousness of the man sitting across from him. “But that’s all gone now. Gone. Destroyed in a breath.

  “And what do I have now?” Johnson said to his hands. “Nothing. I have nothing. Except regrets.”

  Johnson was suddenly aware of someone at his side. Dr. McDonough, with a cup of coffee in his right hand. His left hand he placed on Johnson’s shoulder.

  “Surely, now, that is why I am here, my friend.” McDonough handed the coffee to Johnson, who stared into his wise hazel eyes. “My boy, not for a second do I believe you have failed. As me sainted mother would say, ‘Don’t be breaking your shin on a stool that’s not in your way.’ I believe you have triumphed. And your greatest triumph may yet be achieved.”

  Johnson steadied the cup in his hands. “I’m sorry, Brandon, I don’t understand. What can you mean, triumph?”

  McDonough crossed the carpet and picked up his own coffee mug. “Richard, I truly understand your grief, because an Irishman has an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains him through temporary periods of joy. But, believe me, this should be a time of joy.

  “What was Abiathar’s purpose . . . his father’s purpose? What did they intend to achieve?” McDonough asked, perching himself on the edge of his chair. “They wanted to restore ritual sacrifice in the Temple of God, either on, or in, the mountain of God. This priest, Abiathar, he and his father and scores of others put their lives at risk, for many years. Such excruciating work, in such difficult circumstances, was it not? Do you think, after all they endured—twice exiled from Jerusalem, years laboring in the bowels of the earth, eating and breathing limestone dust, praying over their brothers buried under collapsed tunnels—after all that, do you truly believe this Abiathar would leave the existence of a Third Temple simply to chance? To the chance that his message would travel hundreds of kilometers, through Christian and Muslim armies, and come to rest in the hands of the one man who could read it? What, honestly, are the odds of that happening in 1099? Are you with me there, love?”

  The designs in the Persian rug began to swim before Johnson’s eyes, a mirror image of the confusion in his mind.

  “Richard . . . tell me, son, how closely did you examine the outside of the mezuzah? The container which held the scroll for so many years . . . how closely was it inspected, eh?”

  “What are you talking about?” The words came out like a rebuke. “We were interested in the scroll, in its language and structure, in its message,” snapped Johnson. “What of the mezuzah?”

  “Richard, ancient mezuzahs were often inscribed on the outside with messages of equal importance to the scroll within.

  “What was Abiathar’s Plan B?” he asked. “Surely, these men would have had alternatives in play. What if the Temple under the Mount was never found? It appears Abiathar’s message never reached the man in Egypt to whom it was sent. Is this the only message he would send? Or, more likely, what if his temple was destroyed by some earthquake or flood or other natural disaster? What would they have done then? Just give up? I think not, Richard. Me sainted mother used to say, ‘Brandon, you’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.’ This was a man of action. He would not have simply shrugged his shoulders and hoped. What else did Abiathar try to tell us? Are there other messages, besides the one on the scroll?”

  Johnson pinched the edge of the cloth and peeled away the flaps of acid-free cotton embracing the metal tube. There was little light inside the vault of the Collector’s Club, but enough to reflect off the bronze surface and snag the glint in McDonough’s eyes. He watched as his colleague’s face shifted through a gamut of expressions . . . wonder coming back again and again.

  “Is it inside?”

  Johnson turned within the vault and reached over to a wide, thin, stainless steel drawer. The drawer slid open silently. “No, we didn’t want to roll it again once we got back to the States.” Johnson lifted the drawer off its soft rollers and placed it on the table alongside the mezuzah. He flipped a catch and opened the stainless steel lid against the hinges on its back rim. “We’re all concerned, not just for its safety but also about the effects of our weather on the scroll itself. This vault was designed to preserve the precious stamps that fill these drawers. No moisture. No humidity. Temperature controlled.” Johnson lifted the thin tissue paper covering, exposing the scroll to low light. He stepped back.

  An inhale caught in McDonough’s throat as his left hand came up and clutched the lapel of his jacket. “Holy Mother of God . . . ’tis beautiful,” he whispered. “Wonderfully preserved.”

  “Ha!” Johnson leaned back against the inside of the vault. “You would have been appalled at the way we treated this treasure in the tunnels under the Temple Mount. Carrying it around like a letter to Uncle Phil. We swam across an underground lake with it; can you believe that? It’s only dumb luck that kept it from being destroyed.”

  “Or, perhaps a spot of divine intervention?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing . . . nothing, my boy. A slip of the tongue, ’tis all,�
�� said McDonough. “The letters are beautiful, eh? Artfully sculpted. So much more defined than those on the Rosetta Stone. An amazing find. And this,” he said, pointing to a small circle at the bottom of the leftmost column, “this is the mark of the high priest?”

  “Yes,” said Johnson, joining his friend at the side of the table. Johnson rested his right hand on McDonough’s left shoulder and leaned over the table. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye, but inside the circle are two Phoenician letters, aleph and resh—the hallmark of Abiathar, high priest of the Jewish community that first fled from Jerusalem to Tyre when the Seljuk Turks captured the Holy City. Abiathar . . . builder of the hidden Third Temple under the Temple Mount and author of this coded scroll.”

  McDonough turned his hand over and ran a fingernail lovingly over the aged parchment. “He must have been quite a resourceful man, this Abiathar.”

  Returning the scroll to its hermetically sealed new home, Johnson picked up the rewrapped mezuzah from the table. “Let’s go up to my office. We’ll be more comfortable and have more light to see if our friend Abiathar left us anything else.”

  Back on the fifth floor, Johnson stalled at the threshold to his office, as he had so many times since his return from Jerusalem. The workmen had completed the job admirably. The bow window overlooking 35th Street was not only repaired, but was now restored to the elegance envisioned in Stanford White’s original design. The scars on the room’s walls and woodwork, caused by the blast, were plastered and painted or repaired. But the scars on Johnson’s heart were livid and throbbing with hurt. He loved Winthrop Larsen like a son. Like many fathers, Johnson grieved at the words he never said. Winthrop’s body was gone, torn to shreds by the bombers of the Prophet’s Guard, but his memory lived within these walls. With a reverent sadness, Johnson stepped across the threshold and into his place of grief.