The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (27 page)

50

“I don’t work for ISIS,” Sharif insisted. “I work for the king of Jordan.”

“So you say.”

“Dr. Collins, I realize you’re under a lot of stress right now. But I’m in the middle of a war. I really don’t have the time or interest to argue with you. Would you like to pass a message on to your brother or not? I’ll remind you that you called me. I’m simply returning your call.”

“Not exactly,” my brother shot back. “You texted me first. You said my brother was passing along his greetings. But you offered no proof, and you still haven’t.”

That’s my brother,
I thought. For all his faults, the man was no fool.

Sharif checked his watch and took a deep breath. “Fair enough, Dr. Collins. Ask your brother a question to which only he would know the answer.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Matt said. “What was it that we talked about in the hallway just before we went in to see Annie and the kids?”

Sharif pushed my notebook back across the table. I wrote as quickly as I could and then slid the notebook back to him. He read
the note and looked quizzically at me for a moment, but to his credit he read it to Matt anyway.

“You were explaining a bunch of prophecies from the Old Testament, from the book of Jeremiah.”

“Go on,” Matt said.

I grabbed the notebook and wrote more.

“They were prophecies about the End Times,” Sharif told Matt. “You said that in the last days terrible judgments were coming on Jordan. You said you hoped what ISIS was doing wasn’t the beginning of the fulfillment of those prophecies. You said you liked the king, that he seemed to be wise and wanted to keep the peace, that he’s one of the good guys.”

“Okay, fine, but that wasn’t actually the last thing we spoke of,” Matt replied. “There was something else.”

Sharif slid the notebook back to me. This time, I wrote a note on a single sheet of paper and slid that across to him, rather than the whole notebook.

“He says he warned you to leave Amman immediately, that your life was in danger.”

“Everybody knows I’m not in Amman any longer, Colonel. You’ll have to do better. There was one more topic. The last thing we discussed before we entered the front door of my apartment.”

I couldn’t think. My mind went blank. Sharif again glanced at his watch. We were running out of time, and we hadn’t even gotten to what Matt wanted to tell me yet. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. What was he getting at?

Our conversation had been almost entirely theological, which was probably why I remembered as much as I did. It was so unlike any other conversation I’d ever had. I’d interviewed all kinds of people in my career
 
—presidents and prime ministers, generals and jihadists, soldiers and spies
 
—but I’d never known, much less interviewed, anyone like my brother. I never talked with people about the Bible.
No one I knew talked about it. We certainly didn’t talk about Bible prophecy or the End of Days. But Matt loved this stuff. He was, after all, a seminary professor, an Old Testament scholar, and the author of a textbook for Bible colleges and seminaries on how to study and teach biblical eschatology. I’d never read it. It had never seemed interesting in the slightest to me. In fact, if I was honest with him
 
—which generally I had not been over the course of our strained and at times contentious relationship
 
—I’d always found the whole subject a bit loony. I mean, really, how in the world could a dusty old book thousands of years old tell us what was going to happen in our times? The very notion seemed insane
 
—except he explained it.

After all these years, Matt was starting to get my attention. I remembered being intrigued when he explained that thousands of years ago the biblical prophets foretold the rebirth of the State of Israel, predicted that Jews would return in droves to the Holy Land after centuries of exile, and posited that with God’s help the Jews would rebuild the ancient ruins and create an “exceedingly great army.” Most people considered the idea lunacy for almost two thousand years, including many of the church fathers who thought such prophecies couldn’t possibly be true
 
—not literally, anyway. But Matt argued that May 14, 1948, changed everything. Suddenly the State of Israel
was
back in existence. Jews
were
returning. They
were
making the deserts bloom and constructing great cities and building a mighty army.

What could explain such dramatic, unexpected developments? I didn’t have an answer. True, there were certain historical and sociological and geopolitical realities that made the rebirth of Israel as a modern nation more likely in the mid-twentieth century than ever before. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Holocaust, the implosion of the British Empire, the rise of political Zionism, and the support of Christians for a Jewish state were all contributing factors. But it was still one of the most unlikely events to ever happen in
the history of mankind. What other people group exiled from their homeland for two millennia had ever come back home and reclaimed not just their sovereignty but their nearly dead language? Maybe God did have something to do with it. Maybe there was something to all those old prophecies.

It was intriguing, I’d conceded. But it didn’t prove Jesus was the Messiah. It certainly didn’t prove that he was coming back to reign over the earth for a thousand years, let alone coming back soon, even in our lifetime. These were bridges I couldn’t cross. But Matt really believed such things, and despite the fact that I’d mocked him for years, he wasn’t an idiot. Though I was loath to admit it
 
—to him or to others
 
—he was a lot smarter than me. I’d been a decent student back in the day, earning my BA in political science from American University and an MA in journalism from Columbia, my grandfather’s alma mater, though I’d partied far too much and almost certainly spent more on beer than books. Matt, by contrast, had five degrees. He’d earned a BA from Harvard, three master’s degrees
 
—one in theology, another in Hebrew, and a third in ancient Greek, each from Princeton’s school of divinity
 
—and had a PhD in theology from Gordon-Conwell, with an emphasis in Old Testament studies. What’s more, he’d graduated at or near the top of his class each time. It made it hard to dismiss my older brother as completely as I’d wanted to for the last few decades.

So when we’d talked back in Amman last week, we’d talked theology. What else? He explained the prophecies about the future of Jordan. He’d said it was possible the prophecies might come to fulfillment sooner than anyone could imagine. It made me wonder what he thought of Khalif’s eschatology. Did the Bible say anything about Dabiq? Did it give any clues about the rise of an Islamic caliphate? And what really was the difference between what the Qur’an had to say about the End of Days and what the Bible had to say? I had a feeling Matt knew a lot about this subject. It actually might make an
interesting story for the
Times
, especially given Khalif’s video message. But that would have to wait for another day.

“Are you still there, Colonel?” Matt asked.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Sharif said. “I’m just waiting for your brother to reply. He doesn’t seem to remember. And you’ve got to admit what he’s said already could only have been known by him.”

“No, he could have told you those things under duress,” Matt said. “But I’ll give you
 
—or him
 
—a hint.”

“Okay.”

“It was something Katie said.”

I looked up and scribbled a note.

“She just turned four,” Sharif said.

“Keep going.”

I wrote another note.

“She’s in a Sunday school class,” Sharif told him. “She loves it. Can’t wait to get there every week. And she loves memorizing the Bible. There’s some sort of game if you memorize verses.”

“What were the last verses she memorized?”

I scribbled down a single sentence
 
—less than that, actually; just a phrase.

“Something from 1 John.”

“What was it?”

I winced and shook my head.

“Come on, Dr. Collins, that’s enough,” Sharif said. “We’re running out of time.”

“The verse, Colonel,” Matt pressed. “I want to hear him say it.”

This time I closed my eyes and put my head down on the table. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Instead, the most horrific images from the last few weeks flashed through my brain.

Abdel and the mine in Homs.

Omar and the car bomb in Istanbul.

Khachigian in the café at Union Station.

The beheadings in Baghdad.

The sarin gas test in Mosul, which I now realized had actually happened in Alqosh.

The kamikaze in Amman.

And the children. All those precious children.

Suddenly I sat bolt upright. I reached for my notebook and wrote two sentences as fast as I could. My handwriting was so illegible I couldn’t imagine how Sharif could decipher it. But he did, and he read it, and I was right.

“‘And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.’”

51

“That’s it,”
Matt exclaimed.
“That’s my brother!”

Just then there was a knock on the door. It was Ari Shalit.

“Colonel, His Majesty is asking for you,” the Israeli said.

Sharif thanked him and said he’d be right there.

“It seems he needs you right away,” Ari added. “It’s fairly urgent.”

Sharif nodded but turned back to the call.

“Dr. Collins, you’ve got one minute,” he told Matt. “If you’ve got something to say to your brother, now’s the time.”

“One minute?”

“Fifty-four seconds.”

I handed Ari a note explaining who was on the phone. He looked impatient but waited by the door.

“Okay, right, well, it’s about the video,” Matt stammered. “The video that Abu Khalif made, with the president in the cage
 
—you know the one?”

“Of course,” said Sharif. “What about it?”

“I know where it was shot.”

“How?”

“I’ve been there.”

“Where?”

“Nahum’s tomb.”

“Where?”

“They shot the video next to Nahum’s tomb.”

“Nahum who?” the colonel asked.

“You know, the Hebrew prophet, one of the minor prophets, wrote the book of Nahum in the Bible?”

“I guess,” Sharif replied, not exactly tracking with Matt’s train of thought and not exactly having the time to pursue it.

But Matt kept going. “Okay, well, Nahum was a minor prophet only in the sense that his contribution to the Scriptures was small. His book isn’t very long. But it was enormously consequential because he prophesied the coming judgment of the city of Nineveh.”

“Nineveh in Iraq?”

“Yes, precisely,” Matt said. “You see, God told Nahum to warn the people that their wicked city would be utterly destroyed, but tragically they refused to listen. They didn’t repent. And Nahum’s prophecies of cataclysmic destruction all came to pass in 612 BC.”

“So where is Nahum buried?”

“In a little town, a village really, in northern Iraq, on the plains of Nineveh,” Matt explained. “It’s a place called Elkosh. Have you ever heard of it?”

I looked at the colonel and then at Ari. They were as stunned as I was.

“Alqosh, you say?” Sharif clarified.

“Yes
 
—have you heard of it?

“We’ve heard of it,” Sharif said. “Tell me more
 
—but make it fast.”

“Well, Nahum was Jewish, but he was born and raised in exile, far from the land of Israel, in what was then the Assyrian Empire,” Matt explained. “The Bible says Nahum was an ‘Elkoshite.’ He was born there, and he was buried there as well. There’s a mausoleum at the site with Hebrew writing on the walls dating back twenty-five hundred
years. I was there a number of years ago with some colleagues from my seminary.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t remember exactly
 
—five or six years, I guess
 
—but I actually have pictures of me standing at the exact spot where Abu Khalif was standing, just a few feet to the right of the tomb.”

“Can you send me those pictures?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then text them right now, Dr. Collins. Please
 
—time is of the essence. We have to go.”

“Wait, Colonel; my mom wanted to say hello to
 
—”

But suddenly he was gone. For a moment I thought the call had been dropped. But when the colonel jumped up, headed out the door, and told Ari to follow him, I realized that he’d actually hung up on him, and I was now sitting by myself. But at least I’d gotten to hear Matt’s voice. He’d just come through for me in a huge way, and I was grateful.

What were the chances that my brother had ever been in Alqosh? On the face of it, it seemed preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. This was a guy who was in the middle of a yearlong sabbatical in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan studying the ancient prophecies of Ammon, Moab, Edom, Bozrah, Mount Seir, and who knew how many others. This was a guy who had taken his wife to Iraq
 
—to the city of Babylon, to be precise
 
—for their honeymoon back in the late 1980s, during the reign of Saddam Hussein, to visit the ancient ruins and see the beginnings of the rebuilding of Babylon
 
—including the famed Ishtar Gate
 
—that Saddam had ordered. It was nutty stuff like that that had caused the rift between us. Now it seemed my brother’s nutty ideas were paying off big-time.

I just sat there, closed my eyes, and tried to catch my breath. I was exhausted and the pain in my left arm was growing. I pulled a bottle
of pills from my pocket, the ones given to me by Dr. Hammami, and swallowed one without water.

As I worked the pill down my throat, my thoughts turned back to Alqosh. The evidence that Abu Khalif and the president had been there was now almost ironclad. The case that they were still there was intriguing yet merely circumstantial. What if Khalif and his men had taken the president from the compound after filming the video? Could they have slipped out of the village during a gap in the Israelis’ drone coverage?

It was possible, I had to admit, but was it likely? And even if they’d managed to leave Alqosh, had they really gone all the way to Dabiq? Wasn’t it more likely they were in Mosul, a city of more than a million and a half people, a city completely controlled by ISIS forces? The Iraqis and Americans had been talking about retaking it for months, but they still hadn’t. If I were the head of the caliphate, wouldn’t I be in Mosul? It was the wrong way to think, of course. I was thinking like a Westerner. Abu Khalif wasn’t living in the twenty-first century. He was living in the seventh. He wasn’t trying to protect himself. He was trying to follow the path of the Qur’an.

But did that make it more likely that his base camp was next to the tomb of Nahum in Alqosh than in Mosul? So far as I knew, Nahum wasn’t a prophet mentioned in the Qur’an or typically recognized by Muslims. So where did that leave me? I had no idea.

“Hey, need some company?”

That was a voice I knew. I opened my eyes and found Yael peeking through the door with a somewhat-shy smile on her face.

“Absolutely,” I said, standing. “You didn’t go in with them?”

“I think my work in there is done.”

Reaching behind her, I closed the door to the break room, and for the first time since Istanbul, we were alone.

“How’re you doing?” I asked, standing only inches away from her.

She shrugged.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

We just stood there for a few moments, looking into each other’s eyes, neither saying a word. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything to say. It was because there was too much to say, and we had no idea where to start. That was my excuse, anyway. I couldn’t really read her. I didn’t know her well enough. Not yet.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

“About what?” she asked.

“Danny . . . this . . . all of it.”

She nodded and leaned toward me. I could feel her breath on my face, minty and sweet. My pulse quickened, as did my breathing. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to kiss her right then. But I knew I shouldn’t. It wasn’t my place. She was wounded and vulnerable. She was as exhausted and in as much pain as I was. Maybe more. Probably more. I could see it in her eyes. And we hadn’t talked, not really. She didn’t know how I felt about her. I certainly didn’t know how she felt about me. I thought I did. I hoped I did. But that wasn’t the same as knowing for certain. The only way to know was to ask, and I didn’t know how to ask right then. What if it was all wishful thinking on my part? What if none of it was real? What if it had all been an act? That was her job, wasn’t it? To deceive people. To get things out of them. To get you to give her what she wanted and make it feel like you were doing it because you wanted to, not because she was manipulating you.

Yael Katzir was a spy. I was her mission, or part of it anyway. In Istanbul, she’d needed to get my attention and hold it and win my trust and get me to talk, and she’d done it beautifully. What a fool I’d be if I really fell for an act, no matter how convincing. What an idiot I’d feel like when I was rebuffed, as I surely expected to be.

And even if it was true
 
—even if she really did have some feelings for me and I wasn’t completely misreading the situation
 
—then what? Ari and the colonel would be back any second. Did I really want
them to burst in on us making out? Did I really intend to go back into the war room having discredited Yael in the eyes of everyone in there? It was one thing to contemplate chucking my career out the window to run away with this girl and start a new life. It was another thing to jeopardize everything she’d spent a lifetime working for.

So I stood there and stared into her eyes and forced myself not to kiss her. But then she surprised me by putting her arms around me and leaning her head against my chest. I didn’t know what to say. So slowly, hesitantly, I put my arms around her, too, and closed my eyes again.

I forgot where I was, forgot who might be coming through the door at any moment. All the arguments swirling around in my head evaporated, and all I could think about was how warm her body felt against mine and how her hair smelled like strawberries.

I had a thousand questions and finally the privacy to ask them. But I kept quiet. I didn’t want to ruin the moment. I just stood there in the break room under the harsh fluorescent lights and held this young woman I’d become so fond of. There was nothing romantic about the setting, nothing nostalgic, nothing personal. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it.

But as I held her in the silence, she began to cry.