Ari frowned. “Why would a Muslim want to destroy the Dome?”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that the best way to push Israel into the sea would be to get the Muslim world angry enough to attack us in force? What would motivate the combined armies and air forces of twenty Islamic countries to come at us all at once? What kind of an event might prompt ten million Muslim boys to wade through oceans of their own blood to get at us? The destruction of this Dome would do that.
“Davan, unlike you, I’m not a sabra. I wasn’t born in this country. I didn’t grow up with Hebrew on TV in a nice West Jerusalem neighborhood. I grew up in Ukraine, where we were zhids—the cause of everybody’s problems. Everything bad in life was because of the zhids. You don’t get paid enough? It’s the zhids’ fault. You lost your job? The zhids took it. Our neighbors hated us.”
Ari had never heard Kristall talk like this.
“At school, in the marketplace…it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what they said or even did. It was how they looked at me. Sometimes I wished they would say something to me. I dreamed they would, so I could smash their faces.
“When my family wanted to leave, the government laid an ‘emigration tax’ on us, supposedly to get back the money they had spent ‘educating’ us. It took everything we had, but we left for eretz Israel, and for a while it did feel like a new world.
“It didn’t take me long to find out that nothing had changed. We were still surrounded.”
The air was pale with heat and the exhaust of the streets, the reflection of the dimming sun spreading like a reddish stain over the Dome. Below the Wall, the evening auto traffic was pressed into a noisy, slow-moving wedge. Ari and Kristall looked out over the Old City, its trees and dusty roofs quiet in contrast with the world outside the Wall. Kristall absently pulled out a cigarette, looked at it, and threw it back in her bag.
“I want you to take responsibility for this Ayoub,” she said. “The Eagle is yours.”
At that moment, her GeM sounded from the bag. “What is it?” she snapped a tiny receiver into her ear and then was listening intently. Somewhere, over the noise of the traffic, a peacock gave a faint call. At last she rang off and looked up at Ari.
“You were saying something earlier about ‘ritual murder?’ ”
“If I remember right, you used that expression, not I.”
“How did the Pope die?” she asked. “And Shor?”
“Commando-style—one shot to the head, three to the chest on a horizontal axis.”
“The ceremony continues. You have two more. Died the same way, this afternoon. In an office tower in Tel Aviv.
“Who?”
“Shimon Tempelman and Catriel Levine.”
French Room of the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, Texas, 1200h
Four playful cherubs danced down from a blue heaven trailing a tinselwork of flowers. The ceilings and walls, bright and mellow at once, flowed with ribbons of colored light. Through an arch of gilded plaster, a window revealed a row of bank buildings across the street, but softened the traffic sounds from the abyss below.
“Roast venison with rosemary potatoes.” Pastor Bob Jonas grinned decisively at the waiter, and then looked triumphantly around the table. “Six-shooter coffee with that,” he added in a loud whisper.
“I’ll have whatever Chef says,” Lambert Sable dismissed the waiter.
“Yes, Mr. Sable,” the waiter bobbed. “I’m sure he’ll want to greet you himself.”
“Tell him not to bother.”
There was a tricky silence. Then Pastor Bob laughed. “Not very often a servant of the Lord gets to eat in a place like this. Might as well leverage the opportunity.”
“You mean, to share a table with sinners?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t see anything wrong with eating lunch with the Dallas Morning News. Jesus ate with the publicans and the sinners.”
“Mr. Sable,” the reporter asked, “we’ve been trying to get an interview with you for a long time about your support for Pastor Bob here. What made you agree to it now?”
In his inelegant suit, Sable looked utterly out of place in the restaurant. Nothing fit him quite right. His clothes were expensive, but the shapeless body couldn’t fill them. He had never finished high school, a Marine at eighteen, a software billionaire at forty, never quite sure what other people were about. Two wives were unaccountably gone; his children errant and immersed somewhere in Las Vegas, addicted to this and that. But his mother had raised him on the Bible; it was the one thing he counted on. And now, he was hopeful, the long confusion of his life was over.
“Because people need to be warned. My board wanted me to stay away from you—you’ll understand why—but there’re only a few days left, and I’ve got a burden for all these people.” He gestured around the room.
The reporter took stock of the other guests, mostly women branded with the Neiman-Marcus logo and murmuring over champagne and salads of tiny, expensive greens. She turned back to Sable.
“You’re quite convinced, then.”
“Oh, yes, the winding-up scene is only hours away now.” The reporter was an attractive woman. Sable cursed his sweating habit; he felt his scalp dripping and dabbed it with his napkin. “So I said, to heck with the board, you media folks can help us get the word out before it’s too damn late.”
“Maybe you can help me understand why you feel this way.”
“That’s why I asked Pastor Bob to join us,” Sable said anxiously. “He’s got it all figured out. He can explain it a lot better than I can.”
The pastor crossed her hand with his. “First of all, Olive, are you saved? Are you a Christian?”
“I’m Jewish.”
Pastor Bob grinned at Sable. “We got work to do with this young lady, Lam.”
The reporter explained. “The News sent me because they think I can take a more objective approach to this story. Maybe you could start from the beginning, just for me.”
“From the beginning?” Pastor Bob glanced up at the pink cherubs overhead and appeared to say a little prayer. “Okay. Here goes. The Bible says that before the end of time, ‘the Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.’ We call this the Rapture of the Church.”
“So all the Christians will, what, fly away? Rise up into the sky?”
“Something like that. All we know is that one moment you’ll see us, and the next we’ll be gone.”
“Leaving people like me—Jews, non-Christians, nonbelievers—behind?”
“That’s right. What follows will be seven years of tribulation. The devil will rule the earth, and God will pour out his wrath until he makes an end of all wickedness. At that point he’ll establish his kingdom finally and forever.”
“But how do you know this Rapture will take place on Monday?”
Pastor Bob put his palms together as if in prayer. “Simple mathematics. The Jews measured time in jubilees—periods of fifty years. The earth will only last six thousand years, or 120 jubilees. According to the ancient rabbis, the 120th jubilee will mark the final deliverance from all sin; now, Monday is the Jewish day of atonement and also the end of the 120th jubilee.”
“But the earth is billions of years old. Where do you get this notion of six thousand years?”
“My