Alpha and Omega Read online

  Saul pissed and moaned. He always did when he started facing a new project. Brandon let him. TV shows weren’t one-man bands. You needed a team, and you had to know everybody’s moves.

  When the producer slowed down, Brandon said, “C’mon. Think about it, man. Israel. The Palestinians. Jerusalem. The Apocalypse. If people won’t watch that, what will they watch? ‘Mixed Martial Arts Fight Night 319’? Funny, Saul. But I’m serious. We can make this fly.”

  “Have you pitched it to Gabriela yet?” Buchbinder asked: the first cogent thing he’d said.

  “No. I was hoping you’d do it,” Brandon answered. “If she knows it’s from me, she’ll think I’m trying to upstage her.” She’d have good reason to think that, too, because he was. He went on, “If you put it to her, she’ll figure you saw the red heifer stories yourself. She’ll be able to look at the idea without looking for a knife in the back. And this is gold. You know it’s gold.”

  “Maybe.” Saul held his cards close to his chest.

  “Think it over, okay? If you don’t see a way to make it work, call me back, that’s all. Sound good?” When Saul didn’t tell him no right away, Brandon said, “Thanks, man,” and broke the connection. He waited to see if the producer would call back.

  Saul didn’t. Brandon smiled a predatory smile, there where no one could see it. Yeah, this just might work out pretty well.

  * * *

  —

  “Wow!” Eric said. “I didn’t know you could do this.” The LED light on his hard hat let him pick his way through the tunnel under the Temple Mount.

  Yoram Louvish chuckled wickedly. “Technically, you can’t. We aren’t. This isn’t happening.”

  Behind Eric, Orly added, “And if the Waqf finds out—”

  “Bite your tongue,” Eric said in English. Orly laughed.

  But it wasn’t funny. When the Israelis conquered East Jerusalem and the Old City in 1967, they had to decide what to do with the Temple Mount. For the first time since Roman days, the holiest site in Judaism was in Jewish hands.

  Only it wasn’t just a Jewish holy site. The Muslims had held the ground for the past 1,300 years. So Moshe Dyan imposed a compromise. Jews could go up on the Temple Mount to look around, but not to worship; they prayed at the Western Wall below. Israel provided security, at a distance. The Waqf—the Muslim religious foundation—administered the Temple Mount, as before.

  You couldn’t make everybody happy, not in the Middle East. The Muslims resented the Jews for holding the Temple Mount. Some right-wing rabbis said the Messiah would have come in 1967 if the Israelis had dynamited the Dome of the Rock and started building the Third Temple then.

  A lot of the time, you couldn’t make anybody happy in the Middle East. Archaeology in and under the Temple Mount proved that. The Muslims denied that the Mount was ever a Jewish holy place. They hated the idea of excavations that might prove they were full of it. And they’d brawl if they heard about Israeli incursions. It had happened before. This was life and death—no, heaven and hell—to everybody on both sides…and, to complicate things even more, to all the different flavors of Christianity.

  A triangle, Eric thought, but a hate triangle—no love.

  He had a mineralogist’s hammer on his belt, a tool every archaeologist carried. That was as close as he came to a weapon. He wasn’t sure he could use it even if some Muslim fanatic screaming “Allahu akbar!” tried to rearrange his cranium. He hoped he didn’t have to find out.

  Munir al-Nuwayhi was along, armed with the same not-quite-weapons the other archaeologists carried. He kept his face expressionless as a stone. He didn’t like what Yoram was doing. But he had enough intellectual curiosity to want to be in on it in case it turned up something good. And Louvish had chosen him to come, which meant he trusted him.

  About the combat skills Orly and Yoram owned, Eric had no doubts. Louvish had seen real combat. And Orly had gone through the Israeli Defense Forces. Even when she was at her frilliest and girliest, Eric never forgot that. There was a certain…he didn’t know what…about a girlfriend who could beat him up.

  Not that Orly ever had or anything. But the thing was still there. Every once in a while, it surfaced in Eric’s mind in the bedroom. Whether he was on top or underneath didn’t matter. Was it a turn-on? Can I take the Fifth? he asked himself.

  Himself let him off the hook by asking Yoram, “We’re looking for artifacts from the period of the First Temple?”

  “Yeah. Let’s see those mamzrim from the Waqf say we weren’t here when we bring out something like that.”

  Modern Hebrew borrowed its swear words from Arabic and Turkish and Russian—the revived language originally hadn’t had its own. But Louvish could call the Arabs bastards with a word that came straight from the Bible. Munir would know what it meant. But he didn’t say anything, regardless of what he thought.

  “How did this tunnel get dug without them knowing?” he asked.

  “Carefully.” That wasn’t Yoram. That was Orly. She laughed again. Eric might be sweating bullets down here, but she was having a great time.

  And she was kidding on the square. The tunnel took off from a passageway that let Jews reach the Western Wall without running an Arab gauntlet. Then it dove like a submarine. They were far below the Herodian level. Anything they did find would be old. Were they too deep? Eric wondered, but he hadn’t done the calculating.

  Who had? Yoram? Maybe, but Eric wasn’t sure his boss had the clout to set this in motion. There would be hell to pay if the Waqf found Jews poaching on, or under, its territory.

  “Here we are,” Louvish said. The tunnel stopped and widened into a space that reminded Eric of the bulb on the end of an old-fashioned thermometer. He turned his head this way and that, so his headlamp showed everything there was to see: yellowish rock, mostly.

  What was the last light that shone down here? A torch? The flame from a handheld olive-oil lamp? Had light ever shone down here? Or was this a subterranean wild-goose chase? If it was, some people up top would be unhappy. But that was their worry, not Eric’s.

  The archaeologists played their lights around the chamber. The shifting shadows exposed anything out of the ordinary. They were old hands at spotting things by their shadows. Usually, the sun cast them, but lamps could, too.

  “There!” Eric and Orly said, he in English, she in Hebrew. They both pointed to one stretch of the wall.

  “What have you got?” Yoram was looking the other way when they called out. He turned toward them.

  “Don’t know. But something.” Eric sounded sheepish. He couldn’t make out what had caught his eye before; the light wasn’t right now. But he knew he’d spotted something worth checking out.

  Like a bird dog, Orly kept pointing so they wouldn’t lose it. “Well, let’s see,” Yoram said. He and Munir advanced on the wall. After a moment, the Jewish archaeologist grunted. He stopped and nodded. “Yeah, that’s something. Old stonework—really old.”

  “Uh-huh.” Now Eric could consciously see what he’d noticed instinctively before. When layfolk thought about archaeology and didn’t think about Indiana Jones and his goddamn fedora, they thought about Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, about Howard Carter and Tut’s tomb, about gold and treasure and spectacular artworks. Wonderful things, Carter said when he first looked into the tomb.

  They didn’t think about potsherds, let alone bricks and stonework. But broken pots and the remains of walls were what an archaeologist dealt with every day. Most stone blocks from Herod’s day had a low, flat, smooth raised boss in the center. Where the stonework would be below ground level and out of sight, Herodian masons didn’t bother smoothing the bosses at all.

  The Hasmoneans—the Maccabees’ descendants, who predated Herod—also used rough bosses, but less so than the ones on concealed Herodian stonework. There wasn’t any surviving Hellenistic stonework on the Templ
e Mount. The Maccabees had made sure of that. Persian masonry, which was older still, had bun-shaped bosses.

  This…The bosses were rough, but they didn’t look like Herodian foundation stones. This style was borrowed from the Phoenicians farther north. The blocks were long and narrow, laid alternately in groups of two and three stretchers and headers.

  “It’s from before the Babylonian conquest!” Munir exclaimed. From the Kingdom of Judah, in other words. When these stones were laid, Solomon’s Temple still stood atop the Mount. That pushed things back 2,600 years, maybe further. Now Eric knew the pattern of headers and stretchers—blocks facing out and facing sideways—was what had drawn his eye.

  “But the Jews weren’t on the Temple Mount. Never, no sir.” A scornful rasp filled Yoram’s voice. “Ask the Waqf.” He took his phone from his pocket and photographed the building stones.

  “Let it go, Yoram,” Munir said quietly, and, for a wonder, Yoram did.

  Orly came up beside Eric. His arm slid around her waist. She snuggled against him, but her mind stayed on the masonry. “What’s on the other side of that? How do we see without driving the Arabs bugfuck?” The last word came out in English.

  In any language, it was a goddamn good question. Eric wished he had a goddamn good answer for it.

  * * *

  —

  Kibbutz Nair Tamid lay a few kilometers inland from Tel Aviv. When Chaim Avigad went to see Rosie in the field there, platform shoes weren’t enough. Unlike Arkansas’ wide open spaces, almost every square centimeter of Eretz Yisrael had seen death and burial. So the rabbis said, and he couldn’t argue with them. He didn’t try.

  To avoid religious pollution, then, he had to stay off the ground. But he wanted to see the heifer. People at the kibbutz went out of their way to accommodate him. Even by their standards, he lived an austere life. What fun he could have, they wanted to give him.

  They laid down a roll of indoor-outdoor carpet from his house to the field. Contact with the ground polluted the carpet. But on top of it they laid a roll of bubble wrap—a new one whenever he went out. The rabbis said that gave him enough protection.

  The bubble wrap made just going out fun. It popped under Chaim’s feet. If he jumped up and down…But he didn’t, for fear of going all the way through. He was a good kid.

  When he got near the edge of the bubble wrap—but not too near—he called, “Come here, Rosie!” Her name came out in English, because she understood it that way. Rose in Hebrew was shoshanah. Chaim knew that, but Rose didn’t.

  She knew Rosie—and that Chaim had a treat for her. She stopped pulling up grass and ambled over to him. She even smelled grassy. A fly landed on her ear. When the ear twitched, the fly buzzed away.

  “Here you go.” Chaim pulled a carrot from his pocket. The carrot was special, from another kibbutz in the Negev. It wasn’t pulled from the ground and meticulously cleaned to make sure no polluting dirt remained. No dirt had ever touched it: it was hydroponically grown, raised in a sterile vat from water and chemicals and nothing else. If you were going to be ritually pure, you had to be ritually pure.

  Rosie didn’t care. It was a carrot—that was all that mattered to her. Her mouth took it from Chaim’s hand with surprising delicacy. But then her lower jaw went back and forth, back and forth, turning it to orange mush. A swallow, and it was gone.

  She nuzzled Chaim’s hand, hoping for more. “Eww!” he said, not sure whether that was cow spit or snot. Whatever it was, it was wet and slimy. He gave her a second carrot. A happy rumble came from deep in her throat. Chaim grinned—he liked making her happy.

  But the grin slipped. She was a red heifer, the first in 2,000 years. They’d sacrifice her—the first sacrifice in more than 1,900 years—so her ashes could make other things, and people, ritually pure. Chaim was a good kid. He saw the need…but his eyes stung whenever he thought about it. He liked Rosie alive.

  She nuzzled him again—sometimes he was good for three carrots. Not today. He threw his arms around her neck. She stared in mild bovine surprise. His mother and Uncle Yitzhak said she was just a cow, but they didn’t understand. “I do,” Chaim murmured.

  “Chaim!” As if thinking of Uncle Yitzhak had brought him to life, he let out a yell now. “You’ve got a phone call!”

  “Tell him to get lost.” Chaim didn’t want to let go of Rosie.

  “Can’t. And it’s not a him, it’s a her. A TV reporter from America. Ever hear of Gabriela Sandoval?”

  “No.” If Chaim hadn’t heard of her, maybe he wouldn’t have to talk with her.

  But he did. “Come on anyway,” his uncle said. “She—her production company—they—want to do a story about how we’re getting ready to rebuild the Temple.”

  Thinking about that made Chaim think about sacrificing Rosie. He clung to the heifer. “Is she Jewish? Is she frum?” The word meant observant.

  Uncle Yitzhak laughed. “No way. But she’ll aim the story at the Christians in the USA. If it weren’t for Henderson Cattle, we wouldn’t have Rosie, remember.” He said her name in English, too.

  “Okay.” It wasn’t, but Chaim knew he was stuck. Sighing, he let go of Rosie and retreated along the bubble wrap. It kept popping, but he didn’t enjoy it the way he usually did.

  “Here he is,” his mother said—in English—into the landline when he walked up the steps and inside the house. He took its being raised off the ground for granted, though lots of the buildings in Kibbutz Nair Tamid sat on concrete slabs. She handed him the phone, continuing, “It’s Ms. Gabriela Sandoval, from the USA.”

  “Hello, Ms. Sandoval,” Chaim said. Americans liked you to use those titles. Chaim thought it was dumb, but that didn’t change anything.

  “Hello, Chaim.” Gabriela Sandoval sounded like somebody who belonged on TV or the radio, sure enough. Everything she said was very clear. “You’re the young man who isn’t allowed to get dirty, aren’t you?”

  “I’m one of them, uh-huh. I’m not supposed to,” Chaim said.

  “A lot of the time, people do do things they’re not supposed to. I guess you know that.” Gabriela Sandoval sounded sure of herself, the way TV people usually did. And she wasn’t wrong. A couple of boys who’d been born ritually pure hadn’t stayed that way. They and their parents weren’t at the kibbutz any more. If a boy did something like that, it disgraced his whole family. The American woman went on, “You want to see the Temple come again, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Chaim said. Didn’t she have any clue?

  “What do you think about the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque and everything else on the Temple Mount?” she asked.

  “What about it?” Chaim said. “It doesn’t belong there.” Smiling, his mom set a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s been there longer than the Temple was,” Gabriela Sandoval said. “How will you get rid of it?”

  “I don’t know.” Chaim rolled his eyes. Didn’t she remember he was only thirteen years old? Worrying about that stuff was for grown-ups, and they were welcome to it. He added, “When God wants it gone, He’ll take care of it.”

  “Just like that?” the American woman asked.

  “Sure. He’s God. He can do it.” Chaim had no doubts.

  “When will it happen, then?” She was full of questions.

  “I don’t know, but I think soon. We have the red heifer now and everything, and that’s got to be a sign.” Chaim’s hand still smelled like Rosie. Grief stabbed him—they would kill his friend to restore ritual cleanliness to the world. Chaim wished God could have figured out some other way to arrange it.

  Gabriela Sandoval changed tacks: “How would you like to be on TV with this red heifer?” She was only a cow to the woman. Chaim could tell.

  He had to remind himself they needed publicity in the USA. “That would be all right, Ms. Sandoval,” he said carefully.

 
“Great!” She had enthusiasm, anyhow, like so many people from the States. “Call me Gabriela. Everybody does.”

  Now that they’d talked for five minutes, it was okay. Chaim didn’t think he’d ever understand Americans. “Okay…Gabriela,” he said.

  “We’ll see you soon,” she said. The line went dead.

  Chaim hung up, too. “What do they want?” Uncle Yitzhak asked.

  After explaining, Chaim added, “People from the United States are weird.”

  “They sure are,” his uncle agreed. “But we can use them.”

  * * *

  —

  The Reverend Lester Stark had a long, craggy face; piercing gray eyes; an expressive baritone that was almost a bass; and a four-inch pompadour held in place by lots of hair spray. He also had two dozen buttery-soft Savile Row suits tailored to look as if they came from Walmart five years ago, twice that many neckties (a little too wide, a little too loud), and a drawl that was, unlike much of the rest of him, genuine.

  His Birmingham church was also his studio. Six thousand people saw him live every week. Satellite feeds and the Gethsemane Network took him across North America, into the UK and Europe, into Mexico and Brazil, and, subtitled, to Korea and Taiwan. Lester Stark was a televangelical institution.

  He’d preached on TV for twenty-five years, and not a whiff of scandal had touched him. He was married to his high-school sweetheart. Plenty of girls had thrown themselves at him since, and they’d all bounced off. Some boys had, too, but he was boringly straight. He didn’t seduce secretaries; he didn’t pay hookers to do things he couldn’t get from Rhonda.

  He lived well. He dressed well. His financial statements and his tax forms spelled out what he took and what he didn’t. No matter how well he lived and dressed, his church threw money at poverty and what it reckoned injustice. Donations came in from half the world, after all.

  “The Last Days are coming!” he thundered. “They are close at hand.” When you heard him preach, you wanted to believe. He had that kind of voice, and that kind of confidence. The reason was simple: he didn’t say anything he didn’t believe.