The Great Deception (17 page)

"He's right," Seth echoed. "We're the best.
The circumstances would have to be terrible for us to be 'killed in
action,' otherwise just any old cock and bull story given for our
disappearance will undergo some serious scrutiny logically followed
up by plausible deniability, most likely."

Tyrone nodded, chewing on the end of his
find from the field. "I concur," he said quietly. Then he ambled
over to the side of his parked SUV and stopped. "Well shoot, I've
got just the thing."

"You do?" Seth inched closer,
reluctantly.

Baruch kept at a distance with hands on
hips.

The African American touched the door panel
to his car and it opened instantly. Now it was Seth's turn to share
his partner's incredulity.

"You know how easy that would be to
steal?"

Clearly he preferred the old-fashioned over
the high tech garbage they shoved down consumers' throats. Seth was
the kind of guy that would keep a cell phone until it made its last
call. Or drive a car until it dropped.

Tyrone scrunched his eyebrows and snorted.
"People like you can never enjoy the latest stuff 'cause you're
always worried it'll break, or it's not tamperproof enough. This my
friend," he patted the dashboard, "is safe and secure." "Your
plan?"

"Oh, we're back to that again?" Tyrone
joked.

"....Do you have one?"

"I have a contact," Tyrone said in between
keystrokes on his laptop. The screen refreshed a couple of times
before a login window popped up. "No peeking," he laughed, thinking
back to their conversation earlier on security. Baruch mockingly
put a hand over Seth's eyes. What he didn't count on was getting
his arm twisted.

"Every action has a reaction. The abridged
version of Newton's Third Law." Seth flashed a rare smile while
appearing to enjoy watching Baruch's discomfort. "You got a mean
grip there sir," Baruch gasped. He continued to clutch his arm.
Every now and then he'd watch Tyrone on the computer with little
interest.

Tyrone drew out the syllables, "Alfonso
Marcelo," as he instant messaged somebody. "What?"

"He's our boy in Barcelona," he
explained.

"What good can he do us there when we're
sitting here in Moldova without a plan?" Seth cried. He looked to
Baruch, who simply shrugged, conceding the point.

"Obviously we can't communicate across open
channels," Tyrone said, talking about his contact in the
background, "but from what I've deciphered already, I'd say he's
close to something big. You see, I've been looking for pieces to
the puzzle for quite some time." "Where is this going?" Baruch
impatiently interrupted.

Tyrone put his hand out and held a finger
up. "Do you trust me?" After a little time Seth was the first to
nod. "So what's the picture you've pieced together--so far?" "It
goes like this..."

But before he could finish he made an
excited noise. "He's online!" Baruch rolled his eyes and smirked.
"Any of your other buddies online?" "You got a Facebook?" Seth
continued the line of teasing.

Tyrone slowly looked away from his screen
and with exaggerated disgust said very slowly, "Facebook's been
dead for quite some time, son. These days I'm on the Campfire
network."

Baruch held his chin up and imitated in a
goofy tone, "I'm on Campfire."

Tyrone didn't appreciate the mimicry. He let
the other man know that with a questioning stare that guaranteed
discomfort. Then his eyes grew wide. "He just got done
interrogating two sources connected to what I was going to tell you
about!" he breathlessly communicated after it had sunk in. "Alfonso
Marcello?"

"Mhm." Tyrone ignored any distractions for
the moment while he fast-typed his responses back to his liaison in
Barcelona.

The two Israelis patiently waited. Seth
pulled back on his shirt sleeve to check the time.

"We don't have much time until it's the
second watch's turn," he whispered to an attentive Baruch.

The man didn't flinch. "Yeah."

Seth thought about it for a moment then took
the plunge. "Tyrone?"

"Hm?" Obviously the man wasn't in the mood
for any more childish behavior or jokes. "I'm not sure we can trust
the rest of our team." The words came out slow but sure. Tyrone
blinked. "What?"

"The second watch wakes up soon, too."

"Elaborate on what you just said," the
former Mossad man urged him. Baruch answered, "What Seth is saying
is we haven't worked with this group before." "And there's no way
of knowing where their allegiance lies," Seth added.

Tyrone's eyes shifted back and forth as he
mulled the new information over. His answer to the current dilemma
suddenly appeared on his screen.

"Gentleman?"

"Yes?
”
they both
said in unison.

"You have been reassigned," he inserted a
dramatic pause, "to Germany!"

"What's there?" Baruch asked.

"Your next target."

Seth's eyes narrowed, his muscles
tightening. "Okay...?"

"You'll need my wheels for this first leg of
the journey. I'll get you up to speed on the road," he
explained.

Both men stood there for a moment unsure of
what to do.

Tyrone put his hand on the steering
wheel

and said, "Your mission, should you choose
to accept it..."

Seth and Baruch recognized the catch phrase
and instantly smiled.

"...starts--now!"

Seth opened his mouth to say something but
Tyrone was already talking again. "And no, this message will not
self-destruct in ten seconds." He laughed at his own comic
relief

and added, "I want to live."

At this point the men had already piled
into the back of the SUV and told Tyrone to step on it.

A couple miles later the vehicle crossed the
invisible boundary between Ukraine and Moldova. Tyrone chose to
stay off the roads, avoiding any possible chokepoints altogether.
Border patrol would be much more relaxed during the wee hours of
morning anyways, but it didn't hurt to be more cautious than not.
"So what happens when the next watch wakes up and finds us
missing?" Seth had to ask the obvious.

Tyrone bucked and pitched in his seat from
all the bumps and jolts in the uneven terrain. "Remember when I
went into the house after

you?"

Seth nodded, remembering.

"I planted a little note in official Mossad
letterhead--with forged signatures of course." "You sly devil!"
Baruch erupted.

"Yeah, he's good," Seth murmured. He shook
his head a few times and secretly chastised himself for not being
more observant. Another detail of Tyrone's life trickled into his
mind while he inflected. "You don't like coffee anyways," he said
sort of half-way.

"What?" Tyrone yelled over the road noise.
In actuality his hearing was quite good--he hadn't missed a
syllable.

Seth locked eyes with Baruch and shared a
knowing look.

"I'll bet those weeds never knew what hit
'em though," Tyrone said rather abruptly before the conversation
turned elsewhere.

Only one man laughed in the vehicle at
this.

And it didn't come from the back seat.
"So...Tyrone," Seth started.

"So...Seth?" he parroted back, keeping his
eyes on what was in front of him. "You were talking about this
puzzle of yours you said you had begun to figure out," he paused to
relive the memory, "before that buddy of yours decided to
chit-chat." Tyrone gripped the steering wheel at the one and eleven
positions. His muscles flexed as he constantly wrestled against a
vehicle that desired to err to the left or right.

"Let's review," he said sternly. "There's
Scorpion, a new director, mysterious spaceships floatin' around,
and doomsday draws near." He looked in his rearview mirror and
observed disconbobulation was in the air. "Don't worry though.
We'll have plenty of time to unpack each and every one of those
items I just mentioned," he said with a reassuring grin.

--

The Israeli prime minister dug into one of
his ears with a finger nail for the offending wax that must've been
the reason for him not hearing the director of Sentinel right.

"The Bible?" the secular leader croaked.

Alfred's face burned with shame. Instant
regret struck him in the face like one of his wife's backhands
after he had done something terribly foolish.

"You see sir, our president has been on this
Bible kick lately. Hell, he even said we need to go to it during
turbulent times such as this. What could it mean?"

Prime Minister Tuvia Elkin didn't like where
the conversation was going at all. He and his very leftward-leaning
party held the majority of seats in the Knesset. Their rule
represented what the godless Jewish culture had become. The Bible
to them was a collection of useless tomes not relevant to modern
times and problems.

When there was deafening silence, Demsky
took the opportunity to ask a second question. "Isn't there an
antichrist figure in that Bible of yours?"

This time Tuvia loudly scoffed. "My Bible?"
he blubbered. "Far from it!" He needed another smoke right now. The
fragrant smell of the burning cigar reminded him it was there for
him. Right next to it a shot glass of vodka begged his hand to
reach out and grab it.

Just when Alfred Demsky thought he had
reached a dead end, that's when he heard in his ear, "The
antichrist is real. We shall both of us witness his rise to power
in our lifetimes. Sooner than you think," the eerie voice tacked
on.

The Sentinel director swung from
listlessness back to his stoic, confident self in a heartbeat. "You
mean a one world government led by this," he searched for the name,
"antichrist, is not a figment of some author's whack
imagination?"

After some delay Tuvia said, "Alfred, I'm
not a devout Jew, by now you know this if you didn't figure it out
already." He took a draw on his custom cigar and exhaled. "But,"
his voice grew louder, "the Bible hasn't been wrong when it comes
to prophecy, to date." Demsky was a man of science. The facts, give
me the facts, he would say.

"Give me an example Prime Minister, if you
would."

"But of course. Your first lesson in
eschatology: Israel's rebirth."

"I beg your pardon? Escha-what?"

"The study of end times, Director."

"Okay," Demsky said, now on the same page,
"I think we see eye to eye now." "No other nation has been
scattered before, the diaspora, and then rejoined as a whole.
Thousands of years later, I might add," Tuvia stated.

"You have a point," Demsky conceded.

"But what if it's just mere coincidence..."
The Sentinel director grew so bold so as to share with the prime
minister his hand in that one comment. It was flush with doubt,
agnosticism, and cynicism.

"You're crazy," Tuvia lambasted him. "Look,
Director, I don't much care to engage in a polemical diatribe on
what I know to be true." "You must understand where I'm coming from
though," Alfred argued. "President Toporvsky is..." he chose his
words carefully, "letting his grip slip from control of the
situation. I can't keep shoveling crap when things go terribly
wrong. As it is, we're

already up to our eyeballs in the
stuff."

The picture Demsky painted didn't sit well
with Israel's most powerful man. He grunted, "I don't like the way
you talk to me sometimes, Alfred. You want me to enlist in helping
your cause? Listen to me. It's that

simple."

"You have my attention, sir."

"There's really nothing on the historical
timeline left over before antichrist asserts his claim to rule,
worldwide."

Alfred jumped at the first break in the
man's speech. "Where's this guy coming from?"

Tuvia Elkin took his time to set it up.
"Most Jews don't even believe in an afterlife, let alone end time
events spoken of in the book of Revelation and elsewhere in the
Scriptures. There are those that consider themselves 'reformed.'"
He made sure to punctuate his point with quotations marks around
reformed by the use of his middle and index fingers bouncing up and
down on both hands.

Demsky most assuredly caught the prime
minister's disdain.

"I don't take sides," he said rather thickly
into the receiver. "I'm a pragmatist. I have a Jefferson Bible of
my own. I keep the parts I like, and chuck the ones I don't."

“I see," Demsky said in a faraway voice. He
started to like Tuvia a little more the deeper they got into
conversation.

"North America. The revived Roman empire.
That's where he's coming from." "Antichrist?" Demsky hastily
replied, reeling a bit from the rapidity of the new info. "Who
else?"

The reality began to sink in. Demsky
swore.

"I need your help."

"Anything for the Free Republic of North

America."

Hearing that name coming from Tuvia sounded
so strange.

Alfred stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"Where does the Middle East fit in all of this?" "It's at the
center of it all."

"Thought so," he answered quickly. "What we
need to dissect is how Scorpion is connected with the United
Islamic Caliphate. I guarantee you there's an evil marriage between
the two."

"Perhaps I can shed some light," Prime
Minister Elkin offered.

--

Tel Aviv, Israel

At least on the ground he had a sense where
he was going. Up in the air, not really. The young passenger in the
flying car looked in vain out the window from time to time. He saw
a cluster of skyscrapers off in the distance. He couldn't tell
though if they were headed for them or not.

Azriel looked at the beautiful girl that sat
to his right. He smiled. But inside he felt like a hitchhiker at
the mercy of the driver: grateful for the ride, however uneasy at
the same time about the prospect of trusting a stranger at his word
(her word).

"How old are you Azriel?" Esther's mom
asked.