Life required a certain meticulous order; tasks great and small were best performed immediately.
Only when that was done did she open the drawer to retrieve the tiny medal lion, the lone token of her brother she possessed in the world. It looked like a twelve-sided dime nestled amid the silver corn cob holders. Coldwell took it out and pressed it into the palm of her hand, hard enough to make an impression, hard enough to sear her soul.
Benjamin’s death hadn’t seemed real until the intruders arrived. But now it was very real.
The intruders had tripped over themselves trying to describe the church. They were so wedded to the old age, the ways that had dominated for the past two thousand years that the coming age was beyond their vocabulary. Calling the Seven Angels Christian was like calling Christians Jews. Yes, there were intersections, but the Seven Angels were no closer to Christians — or Jews or Muslims — than they were to Buddhists. They recognized the old age had ended and were dedicated to the new.
The words of the Christian Bible
The Book of the Apocalypse mentioned seven vials: seven wars. These would begin in the Holy Land, where the other ages had begun. Before the wars had run their course, all of the old holy places — Jerusalem, Nazareth, Mecca, Medina — would be destroyed just as Jerusalem had been torn asunder to signal the birth of Christianity. All that was required was a spark.
Benjamin was to have provided that spark. But the old resisted the new, dinging selfishly to its ways.
Coldwell knew that the intruders were lying about her brother’s death being an accident. They might blame a suicide bomber, but surely that was part of a plot to obscure what had happened. The Jews controlled Jerusalem, and it was only natural for them to blame the Muslims. One did not like to jump to conclusions without evidence, but surely some sort of deliberate act had taken her brother’s life.
Coldwell despised mendacity, but it strengthened her in a way and even provided some comfort. These people were her enemy. They were powerful, but they were not so strong as they pretended. Nor as knowledgeable. They seemed to have no idea that she, too, was a member of the church. But then that was by design. Judy Coldwell had done much for the church soon after the angels visited the Reverend Tallis and instructed him to start the movement. Her job as an overseas accountant with an energy firm and then an exporter had been based in the Middle East, and her contacts helped lay the groundwork for Seven Angels’ early missions. These were primitive and paltry, greatly limited by the group’s lack of funds.
That changed when Kevin Durkest became interested in the group. A real estate developer in the Washington, D.C., area, he had been convinced to sell off some of his minimalls and leave the money in various accounts for the group’s use. Coldwell did not know all of the details. There were rumors that some of these transactions had occurred after the reclusive Durkest had died, and scandalous talk that Durkest’s demise had not been the accident the coroner claimed. But death was of little significance to those who believed, as they would be reborn as high priests in the new age, and so these details were not important to Judy Coldwell. And, in any event, by the time he died, she was no longer close to Tallis and the others, nor did she play a visible role in the church.
Which was not to say that she was no longer a member. Soon after Durkest became involved, the Reverend Tallis had asked her to break her active association with the group and become, in his words, “a sleeper.” Such an agent, he predicted, might become necessary in the future as the new age dawned. The old religions might fight back, just as the Jews and Romans had persecuted the followers of Christ.
At first, Coldwell was skeptical. Tallis had never been comfortable with strong women, and she wondered if this was just a ploy to strip her of influence. But her brother convinced her that what Tallis said was true, and after contemplation she agreed that the old religions would surely try to stop the new. And so she stopped associating with the group. She quit her job and took what amounted to an entirely new identity, working for herself in middle America until she was needed. All record of her involvement in the church had been wiped out. She even went as far as to stop communicating directly with her brother, a great sacrifice, as they had been extremely close as children and adults, certainly much closer in her case than her spouse, a boob who fortunately spent much of his time away from home on business. But the sacrifice was of temporal time only; the Reverend Tallis promised that they would be reunited in the new age, and Coldwell knew this to be true.
It would arrive soon, perhaps within the year. The stage was already set for the first war; it would take only a small spark.
Coldwell took the medal with her to the bedroom, where she retrieved a thin silver chain from the bottom of her jewelry box. Slipping the chain through the small hole at the top of the medallion, she placed the medal around her neck, under her shirt. Tears began to slip down her cheek, grief for her brother.
She had a sudden impulse to fly to the Middle East to fulfill Benjamin’s mission. But she couldn’t, or rather she shouldn’t, not without hearing from Tallis. And in any event she didn’t know what Benjamin would have been asked to do. She could guess: money or weapons were to be provided to groups eager to make a catastrophic attack on a holy site, be it Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. There were many such groups, ready fools fired by wrath they did not understand.
Wrath was the hallmark of the old age; hatred was its sign: hatred toward other religions, subjugation of other races. In the new age, all would be different.
4
Ferguson walked along the long street that paralleled the Cairo meat market, slipping through the knots of tourists and locals. A variety of sharp odors filled the air: cooking spices mixing with diesel fuel and dung. He took a left, then a quick right, turning suddenly to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
Ferg’s father was a career CIA man, an officer with a long and varied history. By the time Ferguson had come along, most of his real adventures were over and his service in the Middle East was fairly routine. Still, there had been some harrowing times: the alley where he’d been shot in the head was a few blocks away.
He’d been shot, hit, wounded, but lived to tell about it. That was the point of his dad’s story, one of the few he told. Anyone could get themselves shot in the head. Living to talk about it was the trick.
Ferguson crossed the street and kept walking, catching a glimpse of Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and university, before following a zigzag to the address on Radwan.
The address belonged to a
For its part, the Mossad had agreed to provide only “distant support”: fake IDs and some equipment. Which was fine with Ferguson; it was safer to keep them at arm’s length here. He’d drawn on two CIA officers in Cairo for additional support, one of whom could liaise with the Egyptians if necessary.
Ferguson walked past the building, glancing down the alleyway next to it. The area was popular with tourists; an American such as Ferguson — or Thatch, whose ID Ferg had doctored and was carrying — fit right in. He stopped at a small stand where a man was selling scarves. His Arabic was a little rusty, but the Egyptian inflections he’d heard as a kid came back as he pulled out a long “
If so, it wasn’t obvious. Ferguson held up three fingers for a price, got another frown, and started to walk away. This resulted in a quick agreement; the merchant solemnized the deal with a tirade of praise for the tourist’s negotiating skills, to which Ferguson responded by praising the great artistry of the man’s wares. The vendor
