Fuse of Armageddon (46 page)

“A wedding day seems like a terrible day to cancel,” Silver said.

“Like I said, I don’t have a lot of time. Especially for riddles.”

“There’s only one thing worse than leaving a bride or groom at the altar. That’s getting married when all your last-minute instincts tell you it’s wrong. Sure, you leave a church full of people buzzing about it. But that’s better than a lifetime of misery.”

“Father—”

“Brad, I know this operation, as you called it, has taken a lot of planning.”

“A lot?” Brad nearly laughed. “Do you have any idea of the difficulty of getting armed men on the Temple Mount? And all the equipment? Right in the heart of Israeli-protected airspace? All of this verges on genius.”

“You can still walk away from it.”

“What?” Brad squinted. “You’re serious. You expect me to—”

“You’re in command.”

“I’m on the verge of fulfilling the prophecies that have waited two thousand years. That’s what I command.”

“I’m thinking about the riots and deaths that will follow. Do you want to be responsible for it? Women and children. Innocents.”

“God’s people will be protected. Revelation tells us that.”

“But what if it isn’t prophecy?”

“My whole life you’ve been teaching me these prophecies. Now you’re saying you’ve been wrong?”

“I’m saying I’m not sure enough to believe it justifies turning Muslims against Christians all across the globe.”

“You’re telling me that the Temple doesn’t need to be rebuilt for God. That a red heifer isn’t necessary for sacrificial pureness. That the end times aren’t upon us.”

“If I’ve been right about all that, God will make it happen. In His own time. But if I’ve been wrong, what’s happening tonight is—”

“Don’t you think God
is
making this happen? The existence of the red heifer. Our success in landing on the Temple Mount. It’s just like when David conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites. God led him into the heart of the enemy’s stronghold. God has led us here.”

“This will change world history. Doesn’t that scare you, Son?”

“Scare me? It exhilarates me. I’m a Freedom Crusader for our almighty God.”

“I’m afraid, Son. I keep hearing the words of Jesus when He said His Kingdom was not of this world. He didn’t lead warriors into battle against the Romans.”

Brad walked back and forth. Slowly. Silver gave him the time to think.

Finally, Brad moved in, his face barely inches from his father’s. “I think this discussion is about power,” Brad said quietly. “You’ve never treated me like I was an equal. You’ve always made it clear that your ministry grew as it did because of you and that I’m simply stepping in to maintain what you’ve built. Now, tonight, you see what I’m capable of, and you can’t handle it.”

“Son, I—”

“Don’t worry about not getting enough credit for this. Trust me; I’ve taken care of it.” Brad turned away.

“Son, please, let’s keep talking.”

Brad spun around. “No.” He was almost savage in his anger. “Tonight, stay out of my way. Tomorrow, it’s going to be a whole new world.”

Somewhere in Jerusalem • 20:21 GMT


Since picking Kate up at a drop point, Kevin had been driving a circuitous route, saying little and checking the rearview mirror frequently enough to put Kate on edge.

Kevin’s car was an older model four-door Mercedes—blue, maybe purple; she hadn’t been able to decide in the streetlights when Kevin had driven up to the meeting place Quinn had designated. It was more vintage than restored with a sputtering exhaust system and diesel smoke that she smelled whenever the car stopped at a traffic light. She was sitting up front on the passenger side, where a spring from the seat pushed hard against her thigh. She had a wry thought, imagining terrorists chasing them, needing nothing more than scooters to keep pace.

“Quick stop for fuel,” Kevin said, pointing ahead, a can of Diet Coke in his hand. “I didn’t expect all this driving tonight.”

“Yeah,” Kate said. Kevin had made enough turns to lose anyone tailing them, unlikely as that possibility was. Maybe she’d run in and get a Coke for herself while Kevin was pumping gas. He hadn’t offered any from his stash.

She didn’t get the chance.

Kevin stopped at the pump. A man who had been fueling a white Peugeot on the opposite side of the island stepped across and opened the back door of Kevin’s Mercedes, sliding in directly behind Kevin.

Kate’s first reaction was escape. She yanked at the door handle, but it popped loose in her hand. At the same time, Kevin accelerated, leaving behind the Peugeot with the fuel line still in its gas tank.

Kate half turned, lifting the door handle to swing it as a weapon.

“It’s okay,” Kevin said. “Really.”

“No,” Kate snarled. This had been a setup. It wasn’t an accident that the door handle had been loose. “You’re about five seconds away from needing a big set of stitches. Tell me what’s happening.”

“I will,” the man in the back said. “Just don’t do anything stupid. Kevin had his orders. Don’t blame him for this.”

Kate caught a glimpse of the man’s face as the Mercedes passed under a streetlight. She knew the face instantly but faltered with the name. She’d met him at the Ben-Gurion airport and later at CCTI with Quinn.

Dapper, arrogant, held himself like his presence was a gift to all women.

Cohen.
That was it.
Zvi Cohen.
Head of the Mossad.

“Start talking,” Kate said. She wasn’t going to let her anger fade.

“Kevin works for the Mossad,” Cohen said. “That should tell you a lot.”

“Mossad—or IDF working for Mossad—blew up the van that we were using for a command post in Gaza. Sent in two men to take out Quinn. That tells me a lot too.”

“Told me a lot too,” Cohen answered. “Hamer wants you both dead. He’s got something going. I don’t know what yet.”

Kevin was turning again. Kate saw a road sign pointing to Tel Aviv. Kevin had taken the opposite direction.

“Hamer,” Kate repeated. “Kevin, you let Quinn go meet Hamer.”

“No,” Cohen said. “I did. All that Kevin is responsible for is calling me after Quinn made the arrangements for Kevin to take you to the embassy.”

“I expect that’s where we’re going,” Kate said. If Cohen said yes, she’d know he was lying. And she’d take appropriate action. Like clawing his eyes out after hitting him with the broken door handle.

“No,” Cohen answered. “Kevin’s taking us back to the Old City of Jerusalem. To Mount Moriah.”

“Quinn’s got a cell phone. Let me make a call and warn him.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Hamer won’t hear my end of the conversation,” Kate said.

“Still I don’t like that. I can’t give Hamer the slightest opportunity to suspect he’s being watched.”

“That’s why you let Quinn meet with him? To set Hamer up?”

“As a cop, I’m sure you’d understand.”

“As a cop, I would have let Quinn know what was happening.” Then Kate understood, and her anger swelled more. “You’ve been using Quinn all along. Because you knew he’d be tethered to Kevin and everything would be reported back to you.”

“Hamer is playing Russian roulette with a gun called Armageddon,” Cohen said. “Your opinion on ethics doesn’t bother me. Too much is at stake.”

“I’m calling Quinn. He deserves better than this.”

“Although you didn’t mind setting him up at the harbor?”

“Go spit,” Kate said, not allowing her outside voice to match what her inside voice wanted to say. “Quinn’s good. He won’t give anything away to Hamer.”

“I don’t trust Quinn,” Cohen said.

“I do.”

“Although he was supposed to be on an airplane with you to face a murder indictment?”

“He’s meeting Hamer, and I’m going to call him.”

Cohen’s sigh was audible above the bad exhaust system of Kevin’s old Mercedes. He leaned forward and put the barrel of a pistol against Kate’s skull, just below her left ear. “I would rather have you helping me than have you dead. But you don’t understand what’s at stake here. So I will shoot if I have to. In the meantime, Kevin is going to pull over and put handcuffs on you.”

Kevin slowed down as ordered and shrugged apologetically.

Another sigh from Cohen. “I’ll take the handcuffs off you as soon as I can. But that won’t be until we’re under the Temple Mount.”

“Under,” Kate repeated. “As in underground. Below the Dome of the Rock.”

“I’ll say it for the third time,” Cohen told her. “You have no idea of what’s at stake here. You’re going to find out anyway, so you might as well keep your mouth shut and show a little patience.”

Old City, Jerusalem • 20:28 GMT


Quinn and Hamer walked at a brisk pace along the ramparts toward the nearest set of steps to take them down into the warren of alleys among the ancient buildings of the Old City. The dead body was behind them in the dry moat at David’s Citadel; Hamer had called for police but wasn’t going to wait.

“About four months ago,” Hamer said, “your partner brought us some information that the Mossad confirmed for IDF.”

“Rossett?” Quinn wasn’t surprised. Rossett kept secrets. Plenty of them.

“He’s got as many connections in the Arab world as we do. I don’t have to tell you about Iran’s hatred for Israel and America.”

Except for occasional couples, they were alone. The Old City was frenzied during the day, but at night it rolled up like the awnings over the street bazaars.

“Rossett had a source that discovered a lot of Iranian oil money was going to Khaled Safady. We had the resources to go from there and trace the money trail from both ends. We confirmed Iran. Here’s the irony: Safady was able to stay invisible for years. But when a lot of money begins to flow, it’s impossible to hide the flow. So we followed the money, and it led us to Safady. Just as important, we found out he was using the money to plan this hostage-taking event to humiliate Israel and the United States. His idea. Fully supported by Iranian sources.”

“What? You knew about this? You could have stopped it?”

“You’ll understand soon enough why Rossett couldn’t tell you. By following the money, the Mossad also found substantial evidence that, over the last few years, Iran’s been able to smuggle binary chemicals into Arab hands in Israel—sarin.”

Quinn couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath. Sarin had a short shelf life when mixed but lasted much longer when stored in binary chemical weapons, with methylphosphonyl difluoride on one side of a portioned chamber and a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and isopropyl amine on the other.

“Yeah,” Hamer said flatly. “Can you think of anything worse?”

As a weapon of mass destruction, sarin was a security nightmare. It was colorless, odorless at room temperature, and an extremely potent organophosphate compound that disrupted the nervous system, five hundred times as toxic as cyanide. Because it was invisible and undetectable by smell, victims had no idea they were about to die until they started bleeding from the mouth, nose, and eyes, then going into respiratory failure, convulsions, coma, and death.

“Bad news,” Quinn said, wondering what this had to do with Safady. “Still, Israel’s security is too tight to allow enough in to take out a major part of the population.”

“But not tight enough to stop canisters in small quantities coming from cargo ships.”

“That’s my point. Small quantities means relatively small danger. Takes it out of the realm of weapons of mass destruction.”

“Unless those small quantities accumulate.” Hamer pointed at an upcoming corner to show Quinn they were going to turn. It seemed deathly quiet in the Old City. IDF had sealed off the traffic arteries around it. Many of the residents had fled earlier. It was hard to believe that only hundreds of yards away, across the Armenian and Jewish quarters, there were hundreds of IDF special forces in place, guarding a terrorist incident that was playing out on a world stage.

“This country is too small for a storage area that the Mossad wouldn’t discover,” Quinn said. “Wouldn’t be any sense trying to find a place in Gaza or the West Bank to store it. If you release the binaries in any quantity there, you only kill Arabs. Not Jews. So it doesn’t do the terrorists much good there.”

“How about in the center of Jerusalem?”

“I don’t buy it. Your intel is too good to let that happen.”

“There are thirty-five acres we don’t control. Thirty-five acres we can’t even check.”

Quinn stopped abruptly. “The Temple Mount.”

“Right. With dump trucks going in and out that Israel is helpless to stop.”

“Bulldozers, too,” Quinn said. “The Temple excavations.”

Once, despite protests by horrified Jewish archaeologists, the Waqf had brought in a bulldozer to clear a foundation. This, in retrospect, was nothing compared to the next project. To make an emergency exit for Solomon’s Stables, an underground area sometimes used as a mosque, Waqf bulldozers had created a cavern the size of a soccer field. Six thousand tons of dirt, filled with archaeological potential, were hauled away by heavy equipment and large trucks. Hundreds of truckloads were taken, often in the dead of night. Israeli authorities had been helpless to stop this, knowing the potential for riots if they interfered with Muslim control of the Temple Mount.

“I’d heard rumors that the Waqf was moving holy water there from Mecca to underground cisterns below the Temple Mount,” Quinn said. “You’re going to tell me that right in the middle of the one city where Jews and Palestinians barely managed to coexist without war, there’s a hidden weapon that can kill all of them by the thousands?”

“Wrong breeze, or lack of a breeze, and you can make that hundreds of thousands. Surviving Palestinians would blame the Jews. Surviving Jews would blame the Palestinians.”

Quinn was getting weary of making the same point. But such were the politics of Israel and Gaza and religion. “The war that would follow would make the riots over Israeli occupation of the Temple Mount seem like a pillow fight in comparison.”

Hamer pointed at another turn into a small, cobblestoned parking lot almost beneath the rampart, lined with the small, square buildings of the Armenian Quarter. Quinn followed.