Fuse of Armageddon (28 page)

Safady kept walking.

“Electronic funds transfer,” Silver went on. “I have to provide someone in my organization with a password for money to be released. I won’t do it.” Saying it, he realized he wouldn’t do it. Not even with the threat of death. He’d just faced that.

Slowly, Safady turned.

“You save these children, you have the money” Silver said. “That’s the deal.”

Blood dripped onto his knee, forming large splotches that soaked into the fabric.

“You’re negotiating with me?” Safady asked scornfully.

“Harm one of these children, you receive no money.”

“You are trying to negotiate with me.”

“I’m the only one with the power to release the money. You’re the only one with the power to harm or save the children. Send them back in,” Silver demanded. “All of them. How many millions is that worth to you for each child? You do the math.” He was touched again by the supernatural sense of grace. What a paradox. He’d never felt more broken yet more whole.

Amazing grace,
he thought.
This is what it means.

He couldn’t help but begin to quietly sing as an act of worship, tears flowing again. “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound . . .”

Safady began walking again.

Before Silver had begun the next line, the women in the bunk beds started to sing with him. “. . . that saved a wretch like me!”

Safady made no indication that he’d heard.

The song spread like a windblown flame over dry grass. Before Safady reached the doorway, all the hostages were singing the glorious hymn, taking strength from the strength that had been given to Jonathan Silver.

Safady and his men left the room, but the hostages kept singing.

“’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home. . . . Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, I shall possess within the veil a life of joy and peace. . . .”

Movement at the door lifted Silver’s head.

The first of the children had entered. As the hostages continued to sing, the children poured through the doorway, looking around in astonishment at the men and women and their joy in singing.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.”

Silver had been watching the doorway as he sang, anxious to see the one face most precious to him. As the last of the children trickled in, he still had not seen Alyiah.

Surely Safady had not taken her aside or held her back.

No!

Finally, she appeared in the doorway on her crutches, unable to keep up with the others.

Silver closed his eyes in relief and began to sing softly again.

“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound . . .”

25

CCTI Headquarters, Tel Aviv • 14:15 GMT


Quinn’s phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID. “Safady,” he announced.

Hamer nodded. Kate and Brad looked up too.

Quinn picked up the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Quinn.”

“What does the Mossad have planned?” Safady demanded.

“I’ve asked,” Quinn said. “There are discussions at the top level. They promised an answer within the hour.”

“And the first ten million in funds?”

“All I need is an account number,” Quinn said. “I trust you’ll have a way of verifying it has arrived?”

“Not good enough,” Safady said. “You have ninety minutes to get here; otherwise two Americans die.”

“Explain.”

“I will shoot them.”

“I should have asked that differently,” Quinn said. “Where am I supposed to be in an hour and a half?”

“Here. If the IDF has my location, you know where it is. If the IDF doesn’t have my location, I’ll find out that you are bluffing me.”

Safady hung up and left Quinn with dial tone.

Quinn replayed the conversation and didn’t hesitate in his announcement. “I go. There’s no choice, no downside from a negotiating point of view.”

“Unless Safady kills you,” Hamer said.

“That’s a downside only from my point of view,” Quinn said. “Rule one: don’t let personal issues get in the way of negotiating.” The cruel irony that he was likely dealing with the man who’d killed his wife and daughter did not escape him. And now he had to help this man and pretend it didn’t matter to him.

“Rule one,” Hamer said, “dead negotiators are lousy negotiators. Safady wants you dead.”

“I go,” Quinn repeated. “No choice. Safady is only going to indulge in trying to kill me after he’s gotten what he wants from his hostages. But by then I’ll be protected by military. He can’t get me.”

“You have no guarantee of that,” Hamer countered.

“I can guarantee you hostages die if you don’t send me in.”

Hamer studied Quinn. “You want to get closer to Safady, don’t you?”

“Yes. I want to learn everything I can about him. After this is over, it’s going to help me hunt him down.”

“I don’t want a negotiator blinded by hate.”

“It’s not hate. Someone needs to stop him. And even if it were hate, you have no choice. I go.”

“
We
go,” Kate told Quinn. “No choice. Downside or not.”

“No. Too much of a risk,” Quinn said.

“Bad argument right after telling Hamer you’d be protected by military. I go too. Or you don’t go.”

Each glared at the other.

“Neither one of you is going without me,” Hamer said, “but there’s another problem. Think logistics. This is a small country, but the only way you can get there in time is by chopper.”

”So the Israeli government won’t foot the bill?” Kate asked. “How much is a chopper? In the States—”

“In the States,” Quinn said, “you have budget and politics. Here, that’s a little farther down the list.”

Kate looked puzzled.

“Ground fire,” Hamer explained. “Even teenagers in Gaza can get Soviet ground-to-air missiles. They might not be able to read, but they know how to use them.”

“We go in fast,” Quinn said. “Get someone in logistics to choose the safest area to land as close as possible to the site. Have a ground vehicle waiting there for us, and we drive the rest of the way.”

“It’s still a risk,” Hamer said.

“How much is it worth to the prime minister to protect a friend of Israel like Jonathan Silver?” Quinn asked. “And do you want a full-blown military operation that will likely fail with the entire world watching? Or to just put me in for a behind-the-scenes effort that looks like our only chance?”

Hamer gave a heavy sigh and let that hang as he thought it over. “You’ll get your chopper,” he finally said. “To the Gaza border. No closer. I’ll arrange for a vehicle to be waiting, and I can get us through the border crossing at high speed. You should have enough time then.”

“Good,” Quinn said. He moved to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and found his laptop. “Give me five minutes to pack. I want a flak jacket and helmet.”

Quinn faced Brad. “You in for the ride? If not, I need a way to be in immediate contact, 24-7.”

“I’ve got to deal with things here,” Brad said, squirming slightly. “I’ll go back to the hotel and make sure you can get through anytime.”

“What about you, Kate?” Quinn asked. “Sure you still want to babysit me?”

“Maybe sissy-boy here is afraid—” Kate set her mouth—“but you can’t scare me away.”

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 14:27 GMT


Like each of the other Americans, Silver was again confined to a small, isolated prison behind blankets draped down both ends and the side from the top of his bunk bed, in silence and dimness and the stifling heat of the unmoving air. He felt like a child, remembering nights he’d lain beneath the sheets, pretending if he didn’t move, the monsters in the dark could not find him.

Now, however, the monsters had him trapped.

He couldn’t lie on his back, because the new live grenade taped to him would press against his spine. He was afraid to sit on the edge of his bed with his feet on the floor, for Safady had promised to interpret any movement shown outside the blankets as an attempt to communicate. He was too old and too inflexible to sit cross-legged. All that left him was to lie on his stomach, head turned sideways on his pillow.

His left wrist was tucked beneath the pillow, and his entire world had been reduced to the sound of the ticking of his watch beneath his ear.

This was a new concept of eternity. Not an abstract concept about joy and pleasure in the presence of God that he had often preached was the reward for good Christians in the life beyond but the passing of time boiled down to the essence, with no distractions to fool him into thinking his life would last forever. Just the tick, tick, tick of a force so unstoppable in this universe that only God, standing outside of it, was unaffected by it—time.

That was one of the devil’s greatest tricks, he realized. Finding delightful ways to make humans forget about the tick, tick, tick of impending death and the consequences of where eternity would take their souls.

Silver wondered what he would have changed about his life if he could have lived every moment like this, hearing the tick, tick, tick, allowing urgency to galvanize him while he had the chance, as if he were hearing himself knock, knock, knock at the door to God’s presence.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Silver felt as if his soul were as stripped down as his tired body. That he could in this moment hide nothing from God or even from himself. If he were to enter God’s presence today, he would have to confess that his preaching of the gospel had been much more about his own comfort than comforting others.

He could argue before God as he had in front of Esther—that his work in raising money for the ministry had empowered others like Esther to dispense comfort. But it would be a hollow argument.

Shortly, a little girl on crutches would appear with a plastic bucket for him to use to empty his bodily wastes. Without complaint, despite the difficulty of holding the bucket and using crutches, she would then take that bucket away. This was the same little girl who had offered to give up her precious milk because she believed he had lost his, unaware of his vast wealth and power.

Whose efforts would God smile over more?

Silver groaned.

He struggled to his knees, clasped his hands together, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

CCTI Headquarters, Tel Aviv • 14:36 GMT


Quinn spoke to Kevin from the doorway of the office; it was as far as Kate would string out the invisible leash.

Kevin held the perpetual Diet Coke in hand. Quinn had read about the dangers of artificial sweeteners and often joked that a biopsy of Kevin’s liver would confirm or deny those dangers.

“I want 24-7 satellite and Internet connection,” Quinn said. “That’s priority number one.”

“You’ve got a laptop, backup, and extra batteries?”

Quinn nodded.

“Then I’ll take care of things on this end,” Kevin said.

“Anything on Roz?”

Kevin shook his head.

“Let me know when you hear anything. Instantly.”

“And I’ll make sure you can access it via satellite.”

“Thanks for taking care of me.”

“Hey—” Kevin grinned—“if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?”

26

South of Tel Aviv, Israel • 14:57 GMT


Weird.” Kate’s voice reached Quinn through his headset.

They were in the chopper, racing over the countryside, heading to an area east of Khan Yunis in Israeli territory. Hamer had agreed with Quinn; it was better to come in from a point directly east, stopping just short of the border and completing the last few miles on the ground. This minimized the chances of ground fire from Palestinians.

“Weird,” Quinn repeated. Was she describing him? Or was this some kind of thing he was supposed to understand by reading between the lines?

Once, before his wife had died, they’d gone to a party where people had started playing Pictionary, the men against the women. The men got slaughtered. When it was their turn, the drawing would have to be almost photographic in detail before the team guessed correctly—a process that might take minutes. The women, Quinn remembered, had been uncanny. Five lines into a sketch that had no semblance to reality, some woman would always blurt out the answer. It was so consistent the men had accused the women of cheating. But Quinn had come to understand that women had an undercurrent of communication that defied logic.

“Yeah, weird,” Kate said. “Can’t you see it?”

We’re in a chopper
, Quinn thought,
racing to beat a deadline, and I’m wondering if a ground-to-air missile is going to blow us out of the air any second.

“Not quite in the sightseeing frame of mind,” he answered.

“It’s like a line,” Kate said, reaching across and pointing west. “Green and cultivated on one side. Brown on the other. Those funny circle things—I don’t know what they’re called, but that’s irrigated land, right?”

Quinn followed her line of sight. She’d described it accurately. On the Israeli side of the border, irrigated crops looked like giant green circles from the air. The Gaza side, however, had none of the lushness.

“Yeah,” Quinn said, conscious that the helicopter pilot and Jack Hamer could hear their conversation on the open channel. “Irrigated land.”

A frown line appeared across her forehead. She was about to ask the obvious: why was it brown on one side of the border and green on the other?

Quinn touched her knee. In a way, it was a startling act, and it brought her eyes instantly to his with, he decided, a touch of anger in her glance.

He shook his head to silence her.

The frown line deepened.

Again, he shook his head.

Kate blinked a few times, then shrugged.

If he could find a time and place later, he would explain.

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 15:12 GMT