Alpha and Omega Read online

  “We’ll see,” Stark said. “I wasn’t joking. The Book of Revelation has made fools of other men of God. It may make one of me, too. At least God gave me the humility to see that’s possible.” I don’t want to look like a jackass in front of the world. But if You want me to…Your will be done.

  * * *

  —

  “Such a dreadful thing,” Barb Taylor said. “Really dreadful.”

  “Yeah.” Eric frowned at the woman. He knew she meant well. Thoughts of the road to hell, though, and its paving, came to mind. The bastards in the van with the dirty bomb meant well, too—by their standards.

  When Eric didn’t say anything more, Barb tried again: “Things will get better in a while.”

  Eric Katz didn’t answer that. He was an American, too, but he was also a Jew, and partially immunized against Pollyanna-flavored optimism. He frowned harder.

  Orly said something poisonous in Hebrew—in sweet tones, so Barb never suspected. Then she ran another shovelful of dirt through the screens. Anything larger than a couple of millimeters across would get trapped.

  Yeah? And so? Eric didn’t say that, either. The dig on the side of the Mount of Olives was dead on its feet. Barb seemed the only one who didn’t realize it. She worked as hard as she always had. Nobody else gave a shit. They wouldn’t find anything exciting. And if they did, so what? Next to what had happened in Tel Aviv, archaeology seemed small potatoes.

  This archaeology did, anyway. Yoram Louvish hardly showed up here. Munir al-Nuwayhi decided whatever needed deciding. It wasn’t much. If Yoram was digging under the Temple Mount, he was doing it without Eric and Orly. Why would he have brought them to the edge of something interesting (at least by pre-dirty bomb standards), and then left them in the lurch? It made no sense.

  What did, these days? The blood-dimmed tide is loosed….

  Eric shivered in the heat. Born-agains were baying about the Second Coming like dogs howling at the moon, and he had to come up with that line from Yeats? Sometimes a subconscious worked in mysterious ways.

  And the zealots connected with the Reconstruction Alliance hustling their precious red heifer away before much radioactivity from the dirty bomb reached the kibbutz? And the ritually pure children, too, but only after the holy hamburger on the hoof?

  You don’t have to be a goy to be crazy, Eric thought.

  “Anything?” he asked Orly.

  She looked at the screen. “Dirt. Some seeds. Something that may be a sherd. I’m going to cream my jeans.”

  She wanted to shock Barb. It didn’t work. The American tourist just beamed at her. Plenty of evangelicals would have plotzed. Eric didn’t know which flavor of Christianity Barb embraced. Whichever, it was more nearly shockproof—or Barb was—than most.

  Yoram suddenly appeared, as if a wizard had conjured him up. One second, he was nowhere around. The next—here he was. Yoram had a gift for silent movement. He was an ex-rav-seren—a major—in the Israeli Army who’d commanded a battalion in the Gaza Strip. Not a good man to mess with.

  Eric blinked—Louvish was wearing khakis and a blue blazer. No tie, but there were limits to everything. Seeing the archaeologist in anything but a shirt with lots of pockets and cargo shorts wasn’t just wrong; it was unnatural.

  “You okay, Yoram?” Orly asked, so she was thinking the same thing.

  When the head of the dig smiled, Eric felt like grabbing the children and running for the tall timber. You’d smile that way with an enemy in your sights. When Yoram was in the IDF, he probably had smiled that way—right before he fired. To an academic who’d lost his childhood fights and hadn’t had one since he started shaving, that was doubly alarming.

  “Okay?” Louvish echoed. “I’m fine. They are delivered into our hands.”

  “Who?” Orly suddenly got serious. “The ones who helped bomb Tel Aviv?”

  “No. Not yet.” Yoram caught her eye, and Eric’s. He jerked his head: he wanted to talk where Barb couldn’t overhear. They would wonder if the Jews headed off to chat among themselves. And it would be rude—which bothered Eric more than Yoram or Orly.

  So they drifted off one by one. Maybe that made Barb feel better, maybe not. They made the effort. When Munir joined them, Louvish didn’t shoo him away. “Nu?” Eric asked.

  Yoram grimaced. To him, Yiddish was the ghetto language Jews had escaped. To Eric, it was childhood memories of his folks saying things they didn’t want him to understand. What better incentive to learn a language? And, ironically, he’d grasped much more after taking German in college.

  “I have it from the Interior Ministry—we can do what we want under the Temple Mount. The Waqf won’t be allowed to interfere. Won’t,” Yoram repeated with somber satisfaction.

  “What we want?” By the pronoun Munir chose, he wanted to be included. But he didn’t sound delighted.

  “What if they send their thugs down?” Orly asked. That had happened to earlier Israeli excavations under the Mount. The Muslim trust was territorial as a mean dog.

  “They’ll end up dead,” Yoram answered. “Not in jail, not in the hospital. Dead. Word’s been passed. If the Waqf plays rough, we’re ready. The gloves are off. Nobody fucks with us.”

  Eric whistled. “What happens when the ayatollahs and the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Palestinians pitch fits?” he inquired.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Ask somebody who gives a damn.” Louvish lit a cigarette. He offered Munir the pack. The Israeli Arab took one. Yoram gave him a light, then took the question in a different direction: “Ask how much the ayatollahs and the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Palestinians worried when those assholes brought their shit to Tel Aviv. That’s how much I’ll worry now.”

  “They were Palestinians,” Orly said. “I heard that today. One from Hebron, one from Janin.”

  Eric nodded unhappily, though he looked downright gleeful next to Munir al-Nuwayhi. The only way they wouldn’t have been Palestinians was if ISIS or al-Qaeda had imported specialists. He started to ask if Orly knew which faction they belonged to, but didn’t. What was the point? All over the Muslim world, people cheered when the bomb went off. Governments deplored, most of them. Even the Palestinian National Authority sent a statement of concern—coupled with worry lest radioactivity reach the West Bank. But Israel would be a long time forgetting the smiling faces and dancing bodies on Al Jazeera.

  “They were lice on the balls of mankind,” Yoram said in Hebrew. It wasn’t the best language to swear in, but he knew better insults in English than most who grew up speaking it. “But they showed us where we stand, who stands with us—and who doesn’t.”

  “They showed us what being nice all those years was worth.” Orly snapped her fingers: “This.”

  “This attitude will not make it better, either,” Munir said. “In the occupied territories, they do not say Jewish Israelis are nice.”

  Eric knew that, too. They had good reason for not saying so. Orly knew the same thing—or would when she calmed down. But it wasn’t as if Israel hadn’t had provocation.

  He sighed. It wasn’t as if everybody here hadn’t thrown torches into the gasoline drum. Now there was a big fire, and everybody was sorry. But it was too late for that.

  “Anyway, we start work under the Temple Mount tomorrow,” Yoram said. “You three want to be a part of it?”

  “Oh, yes!” Orly said. Eric nodded more slowly, but he did nod. Even more slowly, so did Munir al-Nuwayhi. They all wanted to see what was under there. Muslim obstruction had blocked that for generations. If it didn’t…

  “You handle an assault rifle, Eric?” Yoram asked casually.

  Chaim felt closed in. Raised as he was, always indoors except when he got out on bubble wrap, he’d known that feeling his whole life. It was worse at Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah. They’d run up a special tent with a raised floor of planks for him and
the other ritually pure kids from Kibbutz Nair Tamid.

  He wanted to get out and look around. The Negev was desert like nothing he’d seen before. The Dead Sea lay to the east. To the west was the lunar mountainscape of Sinai. How Moses could have wandered there for forty years with the children of Israel…

  The joke at Kibbutz Nair Tamid was that Moses didn’t have GPS. When Chaim told the joke to somebody at Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah, the man left in a hurry. He came back with Uncle Yitzhak.

  “Don’t make jokes,” Yitzhak said.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Chaim said.

  His uncle nodded. “You and I know that. These people…don’t. They haven’t got much of a sense of humor.”

  “Why not?” Chaim was curious. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Nothing.” Yitzhak Avigad spoke firmly, as if to convince himself and Chaim. “But they’re more frum than we are—”

  “Wow!” Chaim hadn’t thought anybody could be more pious than the people among whom he’d grown up.

  “Well, they are,” his uncle insisted. “We smile about things sometimes—they don’t. They’ve got close connections to the Reconstruction Alliance. Some of their people are goldsmiths, some weavers, things like that. For us, the Third Temple is coming before long. For them, it’s already here. That’s simplified, but it’s pretty much true. With me so far?”

  “I guess.” Chaim still thought getting in a fuss about a joke was dumb. He kept quiet—he could see he’d lose that argument.

  “And most of the visitors here are goyim, and they don’t like company,” his uncle went on.

  “Dumb goyim,” Chaim said. Uncle Yitzhak didn’t tell him to be nice or anything. Ha-Minsarah meant The Carpentry, so lots of Christians figured it must have to do with Jesus. They were wrong. Chaim thought they were wrong about lots of things, but he knew they were wrong about that.

  Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah lay a few kilometers from a rock formation also called Ha-Minsarah, from which the kibbutz drew its name. Piles of prism-like rock there looked like a carpenter’s tools—if you had imagination. On the same hiking trail was the Ammonite Wall. It drew the occasional disappointed amateur archaeologist. The ammonites in the name weren’t the ancient, extinct Semitic tribe but the far older extinct sea creatures whose fossils were easy to find there.

  “You wouldn’t want company, either, if the company you got was people who wanted you to be something you weren’t,” Yitzhak said.

  “I guess,” Chaim repeated. “But people from Kibbutz Nair Tamid aren’t like that.”

  “Nooo.” His uncle answered more slowly than he might have.

  “We’re not!” Chaim exclaimed in some alarm.

  “No,” Yitzhak said again. “But we’re the cousins whose house burned down, and we’ve got nowhere else to stay. We’re welcome and everything, but they feel they’re stuck with us.”

  “I feel like I’m stuck with them, too. I feel like I’m stuck here”—Chaim patted the raised tent floor—“and I am!”

  “Sorry. Nothing to be done about it right away,” Uncle Yitzhak said. Chaim sighed. That was grown-up for, You’re stuck with it. Chaim already knew he was.

  He didn’t have to stay stuck with it. If he jumped down and ran around and did things regular kids did, he wouldn’t be ritually pure any more. He could have a normal life and go anywhere he chose, and nobody could do anything about it.

  But he’d have wasted his life till now. He’d forever be tormented by thinking he could have done all that cool stuff sooner. He’d also be forever disappointed in himself. And everyone else—everyone who mattered to him—would be forever disappointed in him, too.

  He’d played by the rules so far. He supposed he could a while longer. He didn’t want to let people down. He would’ve been offended if anybody said so, but he was a good kid.

  There was a roar, and then something streaking almost straight up. He’d watched a million jets land and take off at Ben Gurion. But those were partridges compared to the hawks that roosted near Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah. The Heyl Ha-Avir, the Israeli Air Force, had a base close by.

  “I wonder where they’re going,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s practice,” his uncle answered. “Or maybe we start getting our own back.”

  “That would be great,” Chaim said.

  * * *

  —

  Haji Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman was not a happy man. The head of the Waqf felt pulled too many ways at once. He had to keep the Saudis happy: they gave the most money. God had given Arabia the Prophet and all that oil, too. So many riches lavished on a barren land seemed unfair, but the world was the way it was.

  And Ibrahim had to keep the Palestinians happy. Only he couldn’t. Nobody could. They were only happy when they were being unhappy. He saw it that way, and he was one. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who’d been appointed by the Palestinian National Authority, was convinced God meant to destroy Israel.

  The ranting made it no easier for Haji Ibrahim to keep the Israelis…if not happy, then below boiling. He really had to do that. If they wanted to throw him out and administer the Temple Mount themselves, they had the muscle. He knew it. All that held them back was the outrage the move would provoke in Muslims everywhere.

  After the dirty bomb, how much did they care about Muslim outrage?

  Then again, how much had they ever cared? He’d been a boy when they overran this half of Jerusalem and the West Bank in what Arabs called the Setback and most of the world knew as the Six-Day War. An Israeli soldier, crazy with ferocity and fear, had almost shot him then, before realizing he was just a kid and jerking his rifle to one side. Haji Ibrahim had never forgotten how black the inside of the rifle barrel was when he looked down it. He’d wanted to pay the Israelis back for that terror ever since, and he’d wound up having to work with them instead. Life gave you what it gave you, not what you wanted.

  And now, the Jews cared about Muslim feelings a lot less than they ever had before. The hulking Israeli colonel in Ibrahim’s office said as much, loud and clear. The Waqf’s head had always got on well enough with the Jerusalem police. He’d even got on well enough—unofficially—with the people who ran the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

  The Waqf’s official view was that the Jews had never built a Temple on the Mount. It was holy because Muhammad went to heaven here. If you looked at the stone inside the Dome of the Rock, you could see the Prophet’s footprints and the imprints of Gabriel’s fingers where the angel held the rock down so it wouldn’t head heavenwards, too.

  When Ibrahim looked out the window from his office, he saw the Dome of the Rock, brilliant sunshine gleaming off the gilded dome. It had been anodized aluminum till 1994, when King Hussein of Jordan paid for the gold sheathing. That gold was microscopically thin, but it was there. It enhanced the magnificence of one of the most nearly perfect buildings anywhere.

  Haji Ibrahim gave his attention back to Colonel Shaul Shragai. Shragai wasn’t remotely perfect. He had a wrestler’s shoulders, a bulldog’s underslung jaw, and gray eyes full of don’t-mess-with-me. He’d been vague about his affiliation, vague in a way that made Ibrahim fear he belonged to the Mossad, the Israeli CIA.

  “You know we’re doing more excavating under the Mount,” he rumbled in accentless Palestinian Arabic.

  “I’ve heard rumors,” Ibrahim said. “Under the agreements in place since the Setback, you have no right to do that. We will resist.”

  “Don’t,” Colonel Shragai said. “That’s why I’m here. If your people interfere, even a little bit, they’re dead. Not arrested, not rubber bullets or tear gas. Dead. Got it?”

  “You may threaten, Colonel,” Haji Ibrahim said. “But when the fury of the Arab people is aroused—”

  “Get a new script,” Shragai snapped. He was even blunter and ruder than the rest of his countrymen. “That one went out the window
with Tel Aviv. If there’s trouble, we’ll line up tanks around the Temple Mount. If anyone hiccups after we do that, we’ll open fire. You hear? I hope so, because things have changed bigtime.” He dropped the English word into his Arabic, waited to see whether Ibrahim got it, and nodded on finding he did.

  “This is not your land. It never was,” the head of the Waqf said. “I don’t know why you want it. You never had a Temple here.” He stuck to the official stand. He was well read in several languages. He knew Western opinion differed from the official stand. His own…was influenced more than he cared to admit by his reading.

  “I told you, get a new script,” Shragai growled. “That’s crap. Even you don’t believe it.”

  “I do,” Ibrahim said with dignity. Truth? What was truth? Pilate had asked the same question not far from here.

  “Okay, fine. You’ve got a line to toe,” the Israeli colonel said, which also held too much truth, whatever truth was. “But you need to understand something. You make us any angrier than we are already, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is gone. The Dome of the Rock, too. If you want to see the Third Temple go up, just piss us off.”

  “The people who want to make this so-called new Temple are madmen,” the head of the Waqf said. That was the Muslim line, too. It had been the official Israeli line. If it wasn’t any more…Ibrahim’s hand found worry beads in his pocket. They clicked as he began to finger them.

  Colonel Shragai nodded. “They sure are,” he said. “And do you know what the dogs who blew plutonium oxide all over downtown Tel Aviv did? They drove the country into their arms.”

  “Is that why you bombed Damascus yesterday?” Haji Ibrahim asked.

  “It’s one reason,” Shragai answered calmly. “After all he’s done, even you can’t tell me anybody’ll miss the President of Syria.”

  Still dignified, Ibrahim replied, “Assassination is not statecraft.”