The 34th Degree

8

Deker sat in the glass conference room on the fifteenth floor, overlooking Wilshire and the cemetery, while two feds argued outside the door. The agent who had detained him in the parking lot was going at it with a tall, thin African-American woman whom Deker recognized as Wanda Randolph, the unflappable former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police’s subterranean RATS division in Washington, D.C. The man stormed off in defeat, and Wanda walked in through the door, a thick file folder in her hand.

“Still can’t sleep, Sam?” she asked softly as she sat down at the table opposite him.

“What am I doing here?” he demanded.

“The FBI here gets a little nervous when they learn that a man of your particular background and talents is skulking around the foundations of their headquarters.”

Deker noted her use of “they” to refer to the FBI, which suggested she still might be working for General Marshall Packard at the Pentagon’s research agency, DARPA. A bad sign for him.

“Why are you here in L.A.?” he asked her. “Did you finally wise up and ditch Packard and his lunatics?”

She said nothing, only smiled.

Dammit.

“What do you people want?” he demanded.

“To help you, Sam.”

“Help me?” he repeated. “You’re the ones who sicced the FBI on me.”

“The FBI was already onto you, Sam,” she said, and opened his file. “And frankly, I’m curious to see how much they’ve got on you before we make it all go away. Aren’t you?”

So that was the bait. Packard was going to ask him to do “one more for the Gipper” and get a clean slate, or else.

“Fine,” he said. “What have I done?”

“What haven’t you done?” she said. “They’ve got you joining the U.S. Army after your father was killed in the north tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, then graduating at the top of your class at West Point. As a Ranger, you disobeyed orders in Tora Bora and went after Osama bin Laden yourself instead of letting the local Afghans do it.”

“They let him go,” Deker said. “We had him. I had him. You were there. You know it.”

She shrugged innocently and continued. “They’ve got the Israel Defense Forces requesting your services from DOD to help them defend the Temple Mount in Jerusalem from both Arab and Jewish extremists.” She paused. “And they’ve properly flagged Rachel Alter’s death as a turning point in your psych profile.”

Deker swallowed hard and said nothing, seething at this blatant ploy to throw the worst experience of his life in his face. He and Rachel, barely nineteen, were engaged when she died from an explosive he had created to take out a Hamas leader. The accident with Rachel was a tragedy.

“Interesting,” Wanda Randolph concluded. “They note your discharge from the IDF but give no reason. But they do say you were deported from Israel a year later for being a 33rd Degree Freemason.”

“I thought it was time I actually did something constructive with my life,” he told her. “You know, build things instead of destroy them. That’s a crime?”

“Dang, no, Deker. Not in America. I’ve seen Masons get medals for their service to their country. But it’s a problem in Israel if you’re cutting a white Melekeh cornerstone from Solomon’s Quarries for a Third Jewish Temple, seeing as it would have to be built where the Dome of the Rock mosque currently sits. The FBI concluded that the Israelis decided you were thinking about blowing up the Dome of the Rock.”

Deker blinked. “And I am being held here by the FBI on what charge?”

“On being psycho,” she said. “They think you’re a walking time bomb waiting to go off, and that you sure as hell don’t belong in federal buildings, especially theirs.”

“Bullshit. You know that’s not true.”

“But they don’t, Sam,” she said, closing the file and tapping it with her finger. “And they also don’t know about the terrible torture you endured at the hands of those Palestinian extremists.”

“They were Jordanian GID,” Deker corrected her.

“Jordan’s intelligence agency is a U.S. and Israeli ally,” Wanda said. “That’s nonsense. It was those bastards in the Alignment who pumped you full of photosynthetic algae and light waves in order to take control of your brain. They seemingly sent you back in time to 1400 B.C. and the ancient Israelite siege of Jericho, but it was only to break you down and extract what you knew about Israel’s secret fail-safe in case of attack.”

“It wasn’t a psychosis, it was real,” Deker said flatly, and realized he was fingering his IDF dog tag hanging from his neck.

“Of course it was real,” Wanda said, sounding like she was playing along with a lunatic. “You were an ancient Hebrew spy sent by General Joshua bin Nun to scout the walls of Jericho before the Israelite invasion. You made love to a beautiful enemy named Rahab who was a dead ringer for your beloved Rachel. In the end, you not only saved Israel-past and future-but established the bloodline that gave the Jews their king David and the world Jesus Christ. For these heroics, the modern state of Israel thanked you by dishonorably discharging you from its armed forces.”

Deker knew how ridiculous it all sounded. Wanda Randolph had proved her point.

What really happened to him was that he had been broken into a million pieces. So many pieces that he could never put himself back together again. Once he was a warrior who broke things. Now he was broken beyond repair, a ghost wandering sleep labs by night and construction sites by day in an apron and waving a trowel like he could make his world of hurt disappear and become whole again.

But he could never know real peace in his heart, never rest until he found out for certain whether his visions, nightmares, whatever they were, had actually happened. The uncertainty since Jericho had stolen his sleep, his peace, maybe even his soul.

Deker took a deep breath and looked at her. “You said you could help me. Help me how?”

“Help you know what’s real and what isn’t,” she told him, and stood up. “But we’ve got to move. We don’t have much time.”

“ We don’t or you don’t?” Deker said. “What if I decide you can’t help me?”

“Then these boys here at the FBI will give you all the time in the world you need to decide,” she warned him. “But by the time you do, this offer will have expired. You’ve got to make up your mind, Deker, if you want to make up your mind. Get it? It’s now or never.”

He couldn’t argue with her logic, however crazy it sounded. And he had run out of options for answers.

“Fine,” he told her. “Let’s go.”

They took an elevator down to the subbasement of the Federal Building and emerged inside a garage with a fleet of black Escalades and several presidential limousines. The fleet was based here for the president’s trips to Los Angeles. A presidential golf cart emerged from a dark tunnel with a faceless driver and none other than Marshall Packard, former U.S. secretary of defense and now head of the DOD’s research and development agency, DARPA.

“Climb aboard, Deker,” Marshall said as the cart pulled up.

Deker turned to let Wanda Randolph get in first, but she had vanished, and he was standing alone. He climbed in back next to Packard. “So where are you taking me?”

Packard said, “Back in time.”