Larry Bond, Jim DeFelice
Angels of Wrath
PROLOGUE
And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels,
Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been about ten years since my last confession.”
Father Tim Casey jerked upright in the confessional and turned toward the plastic window shielding the penitent’s face. The shadow was as recognizable as the voice. “Ah, faith, and it’s a wonder the good Lord himself doesn’t come down from the cross right now and strike you dead for yer sins, Ferg,” he said. “A true wonder.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be making the sign of the cross right about now?”
“Don’t be jokin’ about a thing like this. You’re a good Catholic lad now, or were, upon a time.”
“Never,” said Bob Ferguson, shifting his weight on the kneeler in the confessional. “But I did go to Catholic school. One of the priests there taught me a confession has to be heard.”
“Oh, all right then. Tell me your sins. Leave out the venial ones; I expect they’re legion.”
“Alphabetical order?”
“Here you have me believing you’re serious,” said the priest, “and then you’re committing sacrilege. There’ll be no mercy for you at St. Peter’s gate. He’ll be adding ten years to your stay in purgatory for riding me today.”
“I’m serious. What order do you want?”
“Any order will do.” The door on the other side of the confessional opened, and Father Casey recognized the faithful sighs of Mrs. DeGarmo, an eighty-two-year-old widow who came every Saturday to confess the misdeeds of her youth. The wooden walls of the confessional were thin, and Ferguson’s voice carried a good distance; Father Casey decided he would have to seek a change of venue. “I’ll tell you what now, Ferg, it might be better for you to hold your peace and wait for me until regular hours end. Then we can speak at our leisure, as seriously as you want.”
“How about Murph’s?”
“I was thinking about the side altar, lad.”
“I’m buyin’.”
“Faith, if temptation isn’t everywhere, even in the confessional,” said Father Casey.
“Not up to it?”
“I’ve the five o’clock this evening.”
“It’s only two.”
“All right then,” said the priest. “Given that I haven’t had lunch and you were a decent student once. A half hour.”
Casey started to close the window.
“Hang on,” said Ferguson. “What’s my penance?”
“I haven’t heard your confession yet. Surely I taught you there’s no advance credit.”
“What if I die before you hear my confession?”
“Your time isn’t that short,” said the priest. “Ah, all right. Say three Our Fathers and Two Glory-Be’s, and we’ll consider it a down payment. May the Good Lord have mercy on your soul — and on mine.”
When the phone rang, the man sitting on the couch waited until the seventh ring to answer, even though he had been waiting for the call all day.
“Yes,” he said, his tone flat, neither asking nor answering.
“When?” said the caller.
“Three days.”
“Too soon.”
“We cannot control the timing,” said the man, struggling to keep his tone neutral.
“Next week is not good.”
The man closed his eyes, conjuring the vision that reassured him: angels with golden trumpets raced above the clouds, light raining down on the earth. Fire burned in the sky, and from each corner of the earth came an angel.
“It is already in motion,” he said calmly.
“Very well.”
“Very well,” echoed the man, hanging up the phone.
Aaron Ravid stared at the folded photo of his wife and son, dead nearly eighteen months. They’d been on a bus in a Jerusalem suburb when an Islamic suicide bomber from the West Bank detonated herself, killing five and wounding eight others. Ironically, three of the dead had been Muslims, including Ravid’s wife.
For Ravid, the attack was the final sign that the faith he’d been born into was empty at its core, a tradition rather than a religion. God did not exist, for if He did, He would not take the lives of innocents. God could only be an invention of man: a way to justify murder, and wrath, and unspeakable crimes.
Ravid lay the photograph on the table and turned his attention back to the reason he had pulled it out from his wallet. At the lower right-hand corner of the page in the Sunday newspaper sat a small advertisement, boxed with a double rule. It asked an outrageous price for an old clunker of a car, and gave a number Ravid knew to be disconnected. Few people on the island would have use for the old VW featured in the ad, and most likely no one would bother to try the number. But that was all right; the ad’s real purpose was to summon Ravid to Tel Aviv, to meet with his Mossad control.
It had been more than a year since he had been in Israel, and longer than that since he had spoken to his superiors. Immediately after the attack, his supervisor had told him to rest, and until today he did not believe that he would ever be called back. A small but decent sum appeared in a bank account each month, providing for his simple needs.
Ravid reconsidered the meeting. He had not been told to rest. He had been told he was not needed and would not be needed.
“You will not be called upon,” Tischler said when they met in the secure room. He said it quietly and quickly, without even offering condolences as a prelude. No agent, especially one groomed to walk among the enemy as Ravid had been, could be relied on once his emotions were “exposed.”
A curious way to put it, Ravid thought then, especially as his cover as a Palestinian intellectual had been maintained. But it proved apt. The deaths of his family had torn the skin from his face, leaving his blood vessels and bones open to the air. The Mossad would not take chances unnecessarily, and a man who had suffered as Aaron Ravid had suffered was an unnecessary risk.
Ravid had been planted at great effort and expense in Syria, where at the time of his family’s murder he had a job as a university professor occasionally used by the Syrian government and the Palestinian Authority as a low- level diplomat. Ravid regularly met with members of the Syrian intelligence service and the so-called political arm of Hamas. (They were all murderers at heart, but Ravid brushed shoulders primarily with men who used their brains and mouths rather than their hands to kill.)
More to protect the people who had helped him than to maintain his cover, Ravid had returned to Syria after the meeting with his Mossad supervisors. There he finished out the semester, lecturing for several weeks on Islamic history, before applying for an unpaid sabbatical. This was readily granted; his colleagues at the school knew that
