“So go.”
“Priests aren’t rolling in dough, Ferguson. Not at all.”
“Your order won’t send you?”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d ask them to do,” said Casey. “It would be an abuse of privilege.”
“Take that money,” said Ferg, pointing at the envelope.
The priest’s face blanched. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Ferguson.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant a rich parishioner might find a way to contribute.”
“If it’s the present company you’re speaking of, you’re not a parishioner.”
“Relax.”
“And you claim not to be rich. If I thought you were, son, I would have been asking you to support the basketball team as well. Now there you would do so much good for some boys who didn’t have the choices you had yourself in life.”
“Not lacrosse?”
“Can’t trust the kids with sticks these days.”
Ferguson sipped his beer. Today was his last day off, and his last in the States. It was likely that the CIA agent wouldn’t be back for a long time, which meant it could well be the last time he saw Case, as the kids used to call him. “Why would you want to go to Jerusalem?”
“‘Tis the Holy City, Ferg. The place of our good Lord’s passion. A special place.”
“Sure, if you’re a fanatic. The whole Middle East is wall-to-wall with crazies.”
“Religion is not fanaticism, Ferguson. We’ve had this discussion before. I thought you’d have been paying attention.
“I was just saying it’s an interesting place.”
“It’s a place I’d like to go. Better there than Ireland, of that I’m sure.” As a young man, he had seen bad times in Ireland — mother murdered and his father convicted of it — but even he couldn’t say why that had turned him inward God. The Lord hadn’t appeared to him on a cloud or spoken to him in darkened room, but he had just as surely been called.
“Jerusalem, huh?” said Ferg, checking his watch.
“Don’t get any funny ideas into your head now, son.”
“That’s all that’s in there, funny ideas.” Ferguson rose, then pointed at the pocket the priest had put the envelope into. “Make sure there’s no name in the bulletin connected with that.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” said the priest. “You’re a blackguard as far as I’m concerned, no truer blackguard in all Christendom.” He smiled and gave Ferguson his hand. “Thanks, lad. A lot of kids will be better for it.”
“I doubt it. But you don’t.” Ferguson took a pair of twenties from his pocket and dropped them on the table. “So do you want the mortal sins by category, or can I just hop around?”
ACT I
And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth;
and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men
which had the mark of the beast…
1
“Coming at you, Ferg.”
Ferguson made a show of looking at his watch as their subject, a well-dressed man in his early forties walked out of the small cafe on Ben Yedhuda Street, heading southward in the direction of Nakhalat Shiva. Ferguson began walking before the man quite caught up with him, letting him catch up and then pass him. Their subject continued past a row of restored nineteenth century residential buildings before crossing the street and going inside a jewelry store.
“All right, I give up,” said Ferguson into the microphone at the sleeve of his shirt. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Got me,” said Menacham Stein, the Mossad agent who’d trailed the man out of the cafe. “He’s your guy; you tell me.”
Ferguson heard Stephen Rankin snicker in the background. He pulled out his tourist guide, leafing through it as if lost. Inside the store, their subject went to one of the side counters and bent over a display: completely innocuous, but then everything he’d done since arriving seemed completely innocuous.
“Hey, Skippy, you in the market for a watch?” said Ferguson, speaking to Rankin.
“Screw yourself, Ferg,” said Rankin. He’d been called Skip since he was a kid, but absolutely hated being called
“Make it an expensive one,” added Ferg.
Rankin pushed out of the side street where he’d been waiting. Ferguson took a step back on the sidewalk as Rankin approached, watching their subject inside. As far as Ferg could see, he hadn’t spoken to the proprietor yet.
Though two inches shorter than Ferguson at five-eleven, Rankin weighed close to forty pounds more. Bulky at the shoulders and with a face that looked as if it belonged to a middle linebacker, he appeared naturally menacing; the owner drew back apprehensively as he entered the shop.
“So, Menacham, this jewelry store a cover for something?” Ferguson asked as he played up his lost tourist act, fumbling with a map and moving to the side of the street.
“Few jewelers are known for their radical beliefs,” replied the Mossad agent. “Maybe he’s looking for a good deal on a ring.”
Ferguson examined his map. He and two other members of the First Team had trailed Benjamin Thatch to Jerusalem the day before as part of an operation to break up an American group that called itself Seven Angels. The title was a reference to a passage in The Revelation of Saint John the Divine in the Bible concerning the Apocalypse. Based loosely around a church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the group was dedicated to facilitating the Apocalypse’s early arrival and had apparently amassed more than a million dollars to do so. The FBI, which had initiated the case, believed the money would he handed over to radical terrorist groups willing to cause mayhem in the Holy Land.
Some of the briefing papers on the group erroneously identified them as “fanatical Christians.” In fact, the members viewed Christianity, as well as Judaism and Islam, as having run its course. Only a few of the group’s active members had even been born Christian; the rest came from Jewish, Buddhist, and agnostic backgrounds. They interpreted various scriptures, especially John the Divine’s Revelation, to predict a new two-thousand-year millennium of peace… built on incredible bloodshed, of course.
Among the many various groups of crazies the FBI kept tabs on, the church had caught their attention not because they looked toward the destruction of holy sites in the Middle East but because an eccentric millionaire had apparently bequeathed them money to encourage it. Failing to penetrate the church’s membership, the Bureau had put several of its leaders under surveillance over the past few months. The church’s leader had recently declared
