Without warning, the wooden panel covering the front of the table splintered open around a clean hole. At the same time, Orlando felt a wretched pain tear up through his abdomen and into his chest—an invisible spear impaling his body. “Wh—what . . . ?” Blood pulsed out in quick bursts from above his navel and sprayed onto the shekels. Absorbed in the absurdity of it, he hadn’t noticed the boy scamper off behind him. He backed up from the table, dazed. Delirious, he swung the gun side to side, squeezing off haphazard shots—at the table, at the ceiling, over his shoulder. “Fucking scumbags!” he slurred.
The gun’s ammo clip emptied quickly.
That’s when a broad man with a goatee sprang up from underneath the table and fired three more rounds into his chest.
Orlando crashed onto the conference table, blood spreading out smoothly over the freshly polished finish. He tried to curse them once more, but the words drowned in the bile and blood that gurgled into his throat. The rabbi’s wife came and stood beside the table, arms crossed tight in front of her chest. It was the first time he’d seen her smile.
He felt her spit strike his eye just as the darkness took hold.
65
******
By the time Amit got his shoes on, made it back downstairs, and bounded out the rear service door with gun drawn, the delivery van was gone. No surprise. Oddly, however, the flatbed truck had gone missing too.
The fragmented story that Mrs. Cohen had told him was almost too incredible to believe. Yet even if she’d embellished a half-truth, the implications of what Rabbi Cohen had in store for the Ark and the captive “Messiah” were shocking.
Immediately, Amit broke into a sprint to get back to the car. Midstride, he pulled out his cell phone and hit the send button. The call took three rings to connect. As always, Enoch was heedful about answering his call, no matter what the hour.
“Hey,” he said between heavy breaths.
“Are you having sex?” Enoch joked.
Under better circumstances, Amit would have laughed heartily. “I
need”—
His tone instantly went serious. “Tell me.”
“Just a sec,” Amit said as he approached the car, ducked inside, and
fumbled for the key. The Fiat’s engine turned over with a growl. “Where are you?”
Amit told him as he threw the car into drive and peeled out along the
curved road. He paused to regulate his lungs, then laid out the facts he’d confirmed with the rabbi’s wife—the abduction of an American geneticist, the clandestine shipment flown back from Egypt.
“And where’s Cohen heading?”
“The Temple Mount.” When Devora had told him this, his heart had almost given out. “Something to do with the excavation in the Western Wall Tunnel. I’m not sure about that part.”
“What’s in the box?” Enoch had to ask.
“Something very dangerous.”
This made Enoch fear the worst, because some hard-core Zionists were considered religious extremists, even terrorists. The Mossad kept a very close eye on the select few considered credible threats. Yet somehow Rabbi Cohen had remained below the radar. “A bomb?”
Amit liked the way this proposition resonated with Enoch. So he went along with it. “That or something worse.” If it really was the Ark in that box, he wasn’t stretching the truth.
Along the straightaway below the Temple Mount’s eastern wall, he gunned the engine to swerve around a Toyota sedan moving sluggishly along Derech Ha’ofel. “I’m just about there now,” Amit told him. “You need to get over here immediately—the Western Wall Plaza. And call for backup.”
“All right, Commander,” he said, thinking back to the old days. “I’m on my way. Give me ten minutes. Just sit tight outside the gate—and don’t do anything crazy until I get there.”
Luckily, though Enoch periodically reported to Tel Aviv, he spent three days each week telecommuting from his Jerusalem condominium on Derech Beit Lehem.
Amit pushed the car to its limit as the headlights cut a straight line below the white tombs heaped up along the Temple Mount’s eastern wall.
Amit’s fears deepened. The Old Testament depicted the Ark of the Covenant as a telephone to heaven—a vessel through which Moses and Aaron communicated with God in the Tabernacle. And it was the Ark that could summon God’s essence in the form of a brilliant light—the Shechinah. The Ark’s roster of supernatural powers included an ability to levitate and strike down scorpions and dangerous predators with bolts of energy. It could push back rivers and move earth. It could spontaneously combust anyone who came into contact with it.
But what troubled Amit most was the Bible’s detailed descriptions of the Ark as antiquity’s ultimate weapon of mass destruction, capable of channeling God’s wrath to annihilate armies and decimate cities. Could this
be what Cohen was really after? And this woman who Joshua had dubbed
the Messiah? Well, if this was what Cohen believed, then it stood to reason
that he was convinced that the American was meant to usher in a day of
reckoning that would reinstate Zion as the epicenter of God’s world. He
couldn’t suppress the images of a decimated Temple Mount and a grand
Temple City rising from the ashes.
Scary stuff.
No.
