Good baby, Kagan thought. Please don’t cry.
“ Cole, I saw presents under the tree.”
“ I guess so.”
“ Is there anything special you’re hoping for?”
“ For my dad to stop drinking.”
“ Well, when we get out of this, I’ll talk to him.” The “when” was deliberately chosen, a projection into the future, a further way to make them optimistic.
“ He won’t listen,” the boy said.
“ You’d be surprised. I’m a very persuasive guy. When I mentioned the presents, I thought maybe there was something special that you’d like to open. This is a holiday, after all. What do you think, Meredith?”
She didn’t respond for a moment.
“ Yes, open something, Cole,” she said quietly. “There’s no reason to wait.”
But Cole didn’t reach for anything.
“ Cole?” Kagan prompted.
“ I guess I’m not in the mood.”
“ Sure. I understand. Well, if you change your mind…”
Despite the apprehension that coursed through him, Kagan’s eyelids felt heavy. The exhaustion caused by his wound was taking its toll.
“ Meredith, maybe you could make some coffee. Caffeinated, if you have it. With sugar. I can use the sugar.”
He heard her crawl into the kitchen.
“ Cole, did I see a creche on a table next to the tree?”
“ A creche?”
“ A manger scene. Little figures of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Donkeys, lambs, and other animals that would be in a stable. The shepherds.”
“ Yeah, there’s one on that table,” Cole said. “The three kings. You forgot to mention them. They’re next to the shepherds.”
“ The three kings. Yes. I mustn’t forget them. They’re hardly mentioned in the gospels, but they’re more important than most people realize.”
In the dark, Kagan’s fatigue settled over him. At the same time, his heart pounded at an unnerving rate, hammering in his ears, draining more energy. It was all he could do to stop his lungs from heaving in a desperate need to take in air ever deeper and faster, wearing him down further.
He used the gunfighter’s rhythm of holding his breath for three counts, inhaling slowly for three counts, holding his breath for three counts, and exhaling slowly for three counts.
The irony was that he’d soon need the coffee he’d asked Meredith to make, that without a stimulant he’d eventually run out of adrenaline and crash.
Can’t let Meredith and Cole know what’s happening to my body. Need to keep distracting them, he thought.
The three kings.
His memory took him back fourteen years to the Rocky Mountain Industrial Academy, the covert espionage training facility he’d attended in the mountains outside Fort Collins, Colorado. He was reminded of something he’d learned from one of his instructors, Robert McCaddam, a legendary spy-master who, according to rumor, had once been a Jesuit priest.
McCaddam, who was seventy-five at the time, enjoyed finding implications of espionage in all sorts of situations. Around Christmas, he was fond of standing next to a fireplace, lighting his pipe, and teaching what he called the true story of the season.
“ Cole, I’d like to tell you a story. Will you listen? It’ll put us in the Christmas spirit.”
“ What kind of story?” Cole sounded doubtful that anything could put him in the Christmas spirit.
“ It’s about the three kings.” Kagan bit his lip to ignore the pain in his stiffening arm. “But the first thing you need to understand is, they weren’t really kings.”
“ Then what were they?”
“ You’ll be surprised.”
Part Three
He stared out the window, looking for movement in the falling snow.
“ Cole, did you ever read the nativity story in the Bible?”
The boy was silent.
“ Or maybe you heard someone reading that part of Matthew’s gospel out loud in church,” Kagan suggested.
“ I’m afraid it’s been a long time since we went to church.” In the kitchen, Meredith kept her voice low as she made coffee.
“ Well, it can’t be any longer than when I went to church last,” Kagan replied.
That wasn’t the truth-he said it only to keep bonding with them. That afternoon, he’d spent an hour in Santa Fe’s cathedral, studying a manger display, his mind in a turmoil, trying to decide what to do.
“ The reference to the so-called three kings is very small. Just a couple of dozen sentences. That’s amazing when you consider how much has been written about them ever since. To understand what the kings really were, you need to realize that Matthew’s gospel was written in either Hebrew or Greek. Over the years, it was translated into a lot of other languages. Changes crept in. In English, the word ‘kings’ didn’t show up until centuries later. When language experts try to get a sense of the original words, the most likely translation is ‘astrologers’ or ‘magi.’”
His mouth dry from stress and dehydration, Kagan listened to Meredith pouring water into a coffee-maker in the kitchen.
“ To call them astrologers makes sense because they claimed to be following a star. But I prefer to call them Magi. Does that word sound familiar to you, Cole?”
“ Not exactly.”
“ The words ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ are related to it.”
As Kagan heard Cole breathe with the beginning of interest, he leaned forward, concentrating on something that seemed to shift in the haze beyond the fence, but he decided it was only his imagination. Or hoped it was.
“ The gospel says they came from the east. If you look at a map and consider what was happening at that time, the country they likely came from was Persia. These days, it’s called Iran. Have you heard of Iran, Cole?”
“ Sometimes. When Mom and Dad watch the news on television.”
“ It’s a country that’s had a lot of influence on history. Today, there’s plenty of tension and violence associated with it. Two thousand years ago, the situation wasn’t much different.
“ Basically, Persia wanted to control the area around it, and that included Israel, the country where Jesus would soon be born. The reason the Persians didn’t invade Israel was that the Roman Empire claimed Israel as one of its territories. To attack Israel was the same as attacking Rome, and that was a bad idea. The Persians sometimes crossed the border and raided villages, trying to make Roman soldiers chase them- to lure them into an ambush. But the Persians didn’t have the resources for an all-out assault, so they tried another tactic, the oldest and most reliable, much more effective than a battle: they sent in spies.”
“ Spies?” Cole asked.
Again, Kagan frowned toward what seemed to be a shadow moving within the snowfall, but the moment he focused on that area beyond the fence, the shadow dissolved like a mirage.
“ The Magi were priests with tremendous political influence. The modern Iranian word for Magi would
