Destiny

FORTY

“Hold on,” Marcus said into the phone, waiting for two men on motorcycles to pass. A church tour group walking around him followed in the same direction. “Okay, I can talk,” he said, stepping off the street under the shade of a cedar tree a half block down from the coffee shop.

“Thank goodness all went well with the ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial. Bill Gray said if I hear from you to let you know the sky isn’t falling.”

“What if it had? What would he have said if there had been a double assassination on live television?”

“Paul, Bill is your friend. Let’s move on. Since you mentioned assassination, which leads me to the Syrian, Abdul Hannon, he was really an Iranian-born physicist. He’d gone to North Korea, by invitation, ostensibly to tour their nuclear facilities. It’s believed he came back with extensive details, and a good working knowledge, to continue the Syrian effort to build a nuclear power plant in the area near the town of Palmyra. It’s not publicly known who took him out.”

“Who’s suspected of doing it?”

“Mossad. They might be the same people trying to hack your work.”

“Why, if I’m here on the invitation of the Hebrew University?”

“I can’t answer that. But I had a friend at Cyber Command in Fort Mead help me. The hacker appears to be coming from Tel Aviv, deep in the center of the city. It could be the Mossad.”

“Or it might be someone making it seem like it’s the Mossad.”

“If we heard chatter about you, so did others. Some of the computers we have now can cyber sniff twice around the world in the milliseconds it takes a person to blink once. No weapon on earth is that fast, and potentially that destructive if hackers can penetrate military walls or national power grids. Do you think the Kennedy stuff along with the information about the oil spill has somebody worried?”

“I wasn’t right about an attempt on the prime minister’s life.”

“Maybe it had something to do with the assassination in 1995 of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Maybe you just uncovered it years after it happened. I did some research on that, the killing occurred near city hall in Tel Aviv. I couldn’t find a garden or anything representative of a weeping angel near it. Rabin was shot on the fourth of November, not the tenth. Oh, that reminds me…I’ve uncovered information that indicates Yitzhak Rabin worked under that guy you mentioned, David Marcus. Marcus left Nuremberg after the trials got underway and relocated in what was about to become the State of Israel, but not until he helped them win a war. David Marcus, along with Rabin and others, such as Ben Gurion, were the chief architects of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.”

Marcus blew out a breath. He scanned his immediate area. Tourists strolled through the Old City, an international parade of cultures, stopping to examine the wares of street merchants who could read body language easier than the written word. Marcus felt a headache forming behind his eyes. “You know, Alicia, this stuff that keeps happening? Maybe it’s for some kind of reason, and we’re just part of the current.”

She laughed softly. “Are you saying go with the flow?”

“It’s as if the books in the Bible are definitive yet still a mystery of the world, part of the cosmos that’s a mix of science and faith. I’m trying to find the edge, maybe the edge of time, to build some kind of clear image. But I can only find little pieces — pieces that alone don’t paint a wide swath. It’s like trying to look through a stained glass window, too dark at night and too colorful in the day.”

Marcus paused, the Ardon stained glass paintings. He visualized the large stained glass windows in the Hebrew University library and thought about what Bahir had said, “Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then come face to face. Today I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

“What’d you say?”

“I’m just thinking out loud. It was something an old man in a coffee shop mentioned to me. It’s from the Bible.”

“Paul, I recognize it.”

“You do? I didn’t know you were a biblical scholar.”

“I’m not, but my dad is a scholar of military battles and the generals who led them. He’s a big fan of General George Patton.”

“What does that have to do with the passage from the Bible?”

“I remember Dad talking about a poem that Patton wrote. It was called ‘Through a Glass, Darkly,’ and I remember my father reading it at the dinner table one night.”

“Patton a poet?”

“Hold on a sec, I’ll see if I can pull the poem up online and read some of it.”

Marcus looked around the streets of Jerusalem. Women walked by him wearing burkas and dressed in black abayahs, worn from their necklines to their ankles. None looked directly at his face. Tourists crowded around booths and tables of outdoor merchants hawking everything from silk scarves to cheap jewelry and fake designer purses displayed on make-shift folding tables. It was a continuous garage sale on the ancient sidewalks. There was no wind and the air smelled of body odor, goat meat, leather and mixed incenses.

“Okay,” Alicia said. “I have it. Part of the poem written by General Patton goes like this: ‘I cannot name my battles for the visions are not clear, yet I see the twisted faces and I feel the rending spear. Perhaps I stabbed our savior in his sacred helpless side. Yet, I’ve called his name in blessing when after times I died.’”

“Sound like Patton is making reference to Christ on the cross and the Roman soldier who pierced his chest with a spear to see if he was dead.”

“If I remember my Catholic upbringing well, water and blood poured from the wound.”

“Wait a minute…”

“What?”

“Something’s going on.”

“What do you mean, Paul?”

“All of this. A poem, written by General George Patton. The reference to first Corinthians. The spear. He said I wasn’t asking the right questions. Call you back.”

“Right questions? Who said that? Paul? Are you there?”

Marcus walked quickly back in the direction of the coffee shop. He saw some men cutting dead palm fronds from a tree. He stopped, his heart hammering, watching the men use curved, serrated blades at the end of long poles to saw off the dried limbs. Marcus wiped a drop of sweat from his left eyebrow, the scar high on his right rib cage tingling. He punched in Jacob Kogen’s number. “Jacob, the inscription on the Ardon stained glass window—”

“Yes. What about it? Where are you?”

“In the Old City. The inscription references a spear — do you remember it?”

“It’s from Isaiah, and I know the passage well. It reads, ‘He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks—”

“Thanks. I have to go—”

“Paul, why do you want to know this? What have you found?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll call you later.”

Marcus stood in the heat, his mind racing. He watched older Arabic men, sitting in worn hardback chairs next to their shops. The men studied the approaching tourists, trying to determine their country of origin, and then choosing to greet them in the language of that nation. One man, Marcus noticed, was not watching the tourists. He was younger, muscular body under a stretched T-shirt. He leaned against an ancient stonewall, almost hidden in shadow, and averted his stare when Marcus looked at him.