The Brotherhood Conspiracy (17 page)

“Sure—tell him it’s a very simple reason,” said the president. “And, actually, it’s true.” Whitestone cast a glance at Cartwright, picked up a folder with thermal satellite scans of Bohannon’s neighborhood, and handed it to Reynolds.

“Sam, this has only just begun,” said the president as Reynolds scanned the images, his mouth tightening. “Somebody else might be able to look at that scroll, or that mezuzah, and help us. But, for whatever reason, I think Tom and his friends have been divinely called to be in the middle of . . . well . . . of what may be the most climactic period in human history.” Whitestone reached his left hand across the coffee table between the sofas and placed it on Reynolds’s arm. “My father often told me, ‘Son, you don’t want to get between God and his purposes.’ It’s not only that we likely need Bohannon’s help as we try to navigate our way through the international minefield we’re facing. But a higher power may still have a part for him to play. And we’ve got to ask him to play that part.”

Reynolds met the president’s gaze without a flinch. “At any cost?”

“At any cost, Sam,” said Whitestone. “We may all be asked to make the same investment. But we need to know if there is any more information on that scroll, or that mezuzah. And it appears Tom Bohannon has been selected.”

New York City

Hell’s Kitchen was getting almost as trendy as the Meat Packing District. Manhattan’s continuing renaissance swept through the warehouses of the West Side, and now joined forces with the immensely popular Hudson River
Greenway that stretched the length of Manhattan Island. But in this corner, along 11th Avenue, industrial buildings stood their ground.

The sun was still hard to the east. Bohannon needed to cup his hand over his eyes to shade the glare as he and Commissioner O’Neill emerged from the NYPD evidence storage facility. O’Neill stretched out his hand to say goodbye.

“Listen . . . can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” asked Bohannon.

O’Neill looked at Bohannon then glanced at his watch. “You’ve got something to tell me?”

“Well . . . sort of.”

The commissioner reached out and grasped Tom’s elbow. “C’mon, I’ve got a few minutes.”

O’Neill waved off the two linebacker-size plainclothes officers and led Tom across 11th Avenue to Jimmie’s Coffee Shoppe. They found a booth in an empty corner as the two linebackers came in and sat down by the door.

A round man with a two-day growth of beard called from behind the counter.

“What’ll it be, gents?”

“Corn muffin and coffee regular,” said O’Neill. Bohannon thought even that was courageous in Jimmie’s.

“Hot tea with lemon . . . that’s it.”

O’Neill tapped a bent spoon on the laminate tabletop. “Tom, you understand, right? These clowns haven’t stopped. And they’re not going to.

“Look, I don’t think you have to worry about the Northern Islamic Front, at least not here in the U.S. To be honest, from the intel we’re getting, the leaders of the Islamic Front are still after your blood. They blame your group for the death of their imam, and for the deaths of hundreds more under the Temple Mount when it collapsed. But they’re not the immediate problem.

“No,” said O’Neill, “clearly it’s the Prophet’s Guard you have to worry about. You still have the scroll and the mezuzah in your possession, artifacts they protected for over eight hundred years and still consider their birthright. I’m convinced they won’t stop until they possess the mezuzah and scroll again. That puts you square in their crosshairs.”

Tom shook his head. “The mezuzah’s been opened, we broke the code of the message on the scroll. The secret they protected is no longer a secret. Why come after us now?”

“I don’t know,” O’Neill admitted. “But, clearly, they’re after the scroll and mezuzah. And there must be a reason. So, what’s on your mind?”

“Yo . . . here you go, gents.” Jimmie slid the cups and the muffin, wrapped in plastic, across the top of the counter. Tom watched closely where Jimmie put his hands—what side of the cup he touched—as he got up and rescued the order, including a plate for O’Neill’s muffin.

New York City’s police commissioner only came up to Bohannon’s shoulders, but he was a compact, solid ex-marine under a bald head and a face that carried the well-being of eight million New Yorkers in every crease and wrinkle. O’Neill, thought Bohannon, was part of this adventure since the night Winthrop Larsen was blown all over 35th Street by a Prophet’s Guard car bomb. But Bohannon had known the Commissioner for many years prior, as O’Neill and his wife made regular trips to the Bowery Mission to help feed the homeless. And Mrs. O’Neill was a driving force behind the renovations at the Bowery Mission’s Women’s Center.

O’Neill was an honest straight shooter who often revealed true concern, compassion, and consideration—considerable qualities in a man so accustomed to lawlessness and violence. This was a man Tom had learned to trust.

“Two weeks ago, I got a call from Doc Johnson. A colleague of his from the British Museum had come to visit. He asked Doc if our guy Abiathar could have created a Plan B—something that might give additional hope to the Jews for a reestablished Temple. So Doc and this Irishman, Brandon McDonough, closely examined the scroll and the outside surface of the mezuzah. They found some symbols on the mezuzah. I don’t know what they are or what they mean but, now . . . after last night . . .”

Rory O’Neill leaned over the table, bearing in on Bohannon. “Why go after the safe? There must be something in there they want. Or they think there’s something in there they want, something in addition to the scroll and the mezuzah. There must be more than we know. But why go after the safe?” O’Neill unwrapped the plastic and ripped a crumbling chunk from the corn muffin. “Look, they can’t believe we left the mezuzah in the safe, can they? Otherwise, why break into the Collector’s Club, why try to break into the Bryant Park library? There must be something else in the safe that they want.”

Over the rim of his coffee cup, O’Neill eyed Bohannon. “So, what is it, Tom?”

Bohannon twirled the tea bag in his cup. “When we first discovered the safe, and Joe and I were cataloguing its contents, there were three small drawers on a shelf in the middle. The center drawer was where we found the mezuzah,
wrapped up in the red silk purse. The other two drawers were locked. We never found a key to open those drawers. Then, with everything else that was happening, I guess we forgot about the drawers. Now . . .”

The corn muffin had disappeared. O’Neill threw down the last of the coffee. “Let’s go find out.”

Washington, DC

The connection was far more sophisticated than Skype—the video more precise and sharp, the sound flawless like the two men were in the same room. Still, Jonathan Whitestone felt like a fugitive from an old Flash Gordon movie when the Israeli prime minister’s face came up on the screen. Deep in the caverns under the White House, Whitestone was in one of the few rooms he knew was safe from all outsiders. Neither surveillance cameras nor the White House taping system were permitted in this small room. Nothing said here would ever appear on any record. Which was a good thing.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Elie?”

His head and shoulders pushed back into his chair, Eliazar Baruk visibly retreated from the screen.

“Are you out of your mind?” Whitestone’s rage sent shards of pain through his chest. “How can you hatch a plan like this without letting me know? You and I have bargained our souls on what we’ve planned and, now, you could jeopardize it all for the purpose of some stunt? And you don’t even talk to me about it?”

Baruk pulled himself closer to the screen. “Jon . . . do you tell me everything regarding America’s security? It’s our sovereign right to protect our land.”

“Holy heaven, Eliazar. Rebuilding New Orleans is our sovereign right, but it won’t incite anyone to declare war on the United States. But you . . . if you rebuild the Mount, the Arab world will explode. Are you going to let them excavate the Dome of the Rock first? Are you going to allow them to rebuild their mosque, their shrine to Muhammad?”

“It’s not safe,” Baruk replied.

“Not safe? Don’t play with me. It’ll be safe enough for you to erect the Tent of Meeting, won’t it?”

Baruk smiled—guilt masked as relaxed calm. “Cartwright is very good. Give him my compliments.”

“This is a fool’s game, Eliazar. And it’s likely to endanger everything you and I have been trying to accomplish.”

Baruk leaned even closer to the camera and the screen. “Put away your sanctimony, Jon. You and I have been trying to accomplish something that will be condemned in every capital in the world. So don’t preach to me about the sanctity of the Temple Mount to the Muslims. It is a much more sacred place to my people, and we’ve been forbidden to even walk on its surface for the past thirteen hundred years. The Mount is in our hands. The future of the Mount is ours to decide. We . . . I . . . am determined that Israel will establish lasting sovereignty over the Mount, once and for all. Get used to it, Jon. We’re not giving it back, and the Arabs are not coming back.”

President Whitestone’s anger roiled like thunderheads on the horizon. But his lot was cast with Baruk, and there was no turning back now.

“Jon, listen, it’s not going to affect anything we’ve planned,” promised Baruk. “We do need to rebuild the Temple Mount. It is dangerous the way it is now . . . who knows what could fall next? As far as the Arabs are concerned, we’re just making the place safe. Our Muslim brothers think they have us in their grip . . . promise peace talks, speak of friendly coexistence, while the Muslim Brotherhood topples one government after another and Essaghir is hatching his own plot to control the world.

“We will not wait for the Arabs to move,” said Baruk. “We will never again stand by and watch our people murdered by madmen who want to wipe us from the earth. We will destroy this threat, Jon. Our plans are still in place. Our commandos are already safely in northern Iraq. The Kurds don’t even know they are on the ground, but they are in prime position. It’s only a short jump into Iran. We will succeed. We must succeed.”

Whitestone opened a mental cupboard and stashed both his anger and his anxiety inside. They weren’t gone. They were just set aside until he was ready to unleash them and prove to Baruk that no one sandbagged the president of the United States without being wounded in return. He pulled himself up straight in his chair and slipped on his presidential aura.

“I want you to allow Kallie Nolan—the archaeologist who helped find the Temple—to return to Jerusalem—”

“I can’t allow her—”

“Just wait, Eliazar,” Whitestone snapped. “Give her permission to return to Jerusalem. Nolan’s put in three years of study and research to write her thesis
as a doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University. The thesis is finished, submitted to her readers and review board. But it all goes to waste is she fails to stand for her dissertation in front of the faculty in Tel Aviv. I need you to open the door.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m asking.”

Baruk spread his hands in surrender. “Of course, Jonathan. After all,” he said, “if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”

New York City

Standing in front of the battered safe, Bohannon now noticed that it was not standing straight. It was slightly cockeyed, twisted and torqued from the lower left to the upper right corners, where a long, green stain marked the safe’s crash landing on FDR Drive.

Tom approached the double doors on the front of the safe. He swung to the side one of the large, floral-design ornaments that covered the combination dial, then retrieved the combination from his BlackBerry. He dialed it in, heard a faint click, and pulled on the door’s handle. It didn’t move. He pulled again, harder, with both hands. The door didn’t even twitch.

O’Neill gestured and his two bodyguards stepped forward, each grabbed a handle of the side-by-side doors. There was a good bit of groaning—from the cops, but not from the doors—before they gave up, defeated by the stressed metal.

“Those things are not budging,” said one of the bodyguards. “We could burn it with acetylene, or take a sledge and a wedge to drive them open.”

Bohannon winced at the thought.

“No need for that,” said O’Neill. “Tom . . . the department has an expert on safes who we use as a consultant. But we just sent him to Syracuse to help with an investigation. He won’t be back for at least a week.”

Tom ran his hand over the painted decorations on the front of the doors. Curiosity and anxiety filled the spaces that weren’t occupied by dread. “Couldn’t we find somebody else?”

“Not in here,” said O’Neill. “This is the last place you want to invite an expert on locks. We’ll wait for our guy. Nobody is going to be getting inside that safe, anyway.”

“Yeah,” said Bohannon, “but I sure would like to see what’s inside those drawers.”