51
HADASSAH MEDICAL CENTER
Deker looked out the window from his hospital bed. The modern Abbell Synagogue in the plaza below with its famous stained-glass Chagall Windows depicting the twelve tribes of Israel told him that he was back in the present day at the Ein Kerem campus of the Hadassah Medical Center in southwest Jerusalem. Any further doubts were eliminated by the dozens of IVs, needle tracks and pangs of excruciating pain shooting up and down his battered body.
“You seem disappointed to be alive, Deker.”
Deker turned to see a short, barrel-chested American in a suit standing by his bedside. It was the former U.S. secretary of defense, Marshall Packard, who more than anybody else was responsible for his transfer from the U.S. armed forces to the Israel Defense Forces several years ago. Deker now suspected the IDF had decided to return its defective merchandise to the Americans.
“The Temple Mount—” Deker said, but Packard cut him off.
“All is well,” Packard assured him, then backtracked. “As well as anything concerning the Temple Mount and Jerusalem can be these days.”
“And Elezar?”
“Died in the rubble by the time you were pulled out of that Palestinian house in Jericho.” Packard showed Deker the display of his BlackBerry phone and played a video clip from the nose cone of the Predator drone. “The Hellfire missiles blew them back to the Stone Age.”
Deker nodded. “So Elezar was the Black Dove?”
“Whatever his code name or real name might have been, Uri Elezar was definitely a PLO mole, placed inside the IDF decades ago, probably as soon as he hit puberty. Since the PLO went legit a few years back and other, more militant splinter groups began advancing the Palestinian cause through violence, we can only guess whom he really worked for when he died. We suspect it was a Jordanian cell group within an organization we call the Alignment. We could use your help fighting it when you feel better.”
But Deker was still grappling with the reality that history had indeed changed. He had not made the mistake that had killed Rachel. It was Elezar who killed her. Elezar or, unthinkably, the IDF. Whatever the reality, his guilt now turned to anger. That an innocent like Rachel should suffer like that. That he should suffer still. Now the IDF was going to deny him the opportunity to confront them. They wanted him to go away, to no longer remind them of their own lapse with Elezar—or their own sin.
“When I feel better?” Deker asked. “I can barely feel anything. What did they inject me with?”
“A combination of isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide, streptomycin and ethambutol,” Packard told him. “You picked up extrapulmonary tuberculosis in that hellhole. We had to burn it to kill anything that could breathe from getting out and spreading it.”
“TB?” Deker felt around his neck for his IDF tag and knew it was missing. “No. I’m not talking about all these IVs in my arms. I want to know what those Jordanian bastards did to me.”
“They weren’t Jordanians, officially, but some radical Palestinian Waqf faction,” Packard said. “Somehow they had gotten ahold of a new U.S. interrogation protocol that the Jordanian GID has been testing for us on rendered terrorist suspects. What they did was inject you with a genetically engineered protein from a type of pond algae that’s attracted to light. This virus infected certain neurons in your brain.”
Deker touched his finger to his forehead. “I felt a splinter of light.”
“That’s the fiber-optic cable they threaded through your skull,” Packard said. “It’s what enabled them to send flashes of light directly into your brain. From there they could precisely target certain neurons with light and cause them to fire. They basically took control of your nervous system.”
“To probe my memories?”
“That’s right. Make you talk in your sleep and extract what you knew about the fail-safe under the Temple Mount.”
Deker felt empty, hollowed out, spiritless. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Fortunately, they didn’t accidentally blind you, and you seem to have escaped permanent brain damage,” Packard told him. “But we really don’t know what the long-term effects are of infecting someone’s brain with a virus that makes it susceptible to light.”
Deker was quiet, thinking. “Last night I thought I woke up for a few seconds and saw my dead driver, Stern, by my bedside.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Packard said. “Like I said, we really don’t know the long-term impact of your torture.”
Deker asked, “So, what happens to me now?”
“You broke under torture and gave up the fail-safe. Now your superiors have come to realize that Jerusalem’s only real fail-safe is the good ol’ U.S.A.”
“More than a few in the IDF would beg to differ,” Deker said. “Israel has God on her side.”
“God can’t help you now, Deker. Because the IDF wants you out, one way or another. You know too much and are an embarrassment in the current political climate. So you’ve been dishonorably discharged to our care.”
“To do what with my life?”
“That’s up to you,” Packard said. “When you figure it out, let me know, because we could use a man like you back home in the States.”
“I have no home anymore.”
“Then you’ll fit right in,” Packard said, and left the room.
52
THE WEST BANK
The official maps that Deker had obtained after his hospital discharge a week earlier proved worthless as he drove out in the heat from Jericho. All he had to show after three fruitless days of sifting through the sands of time were a few chips from the modern city’s Oasis Casino and a hangover from too much drinking. He had already visited several other “Gilgals” around the area, tourist traps all, but none resembling the real Gilgal.
Deker couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Did he really take a trip through time? Or did he simply trip out on military-grade hallucinogens and live to remember it?
Still, an archaeological tour of one of those Neolithic sites along the Jordan River with a group called the Friends of the Earth had given him an idea. That site had been dug some twenty years earlier by a team from the Israel Museum and had unearthed thirteen round buildings made of mud and rock, along with agricultural facilities, including grinding stones, pounding stones, axes and sickle blades. Most interesting was a silo containing a sizable amount of wheat and barley—a fleeting image he recalled that one night in the real Gilgal.
He looked at his Landsat thematic map of the area that also included Shuttle Radar Topography Mission topographic data. It was a gift from the chief archaeology officer in the IDF’s civil administration. The officer told him that this same space technology had led to the discovery of the lost city of Ubar in present-day Oman and the ancient desert frankincense trade route in southern Arabia. He only asked that if Deker actually found something, he’d let the IDF know.
The only thing Deker had found so far came from the pages of Jewish history and tradition. From multiple sources he was able to piece together a general picture of what happened to Rahab and the rest he had met back in time or in his mind. He played the scenario over and over like a movie while he searched for Gilgal.
