The Doomsday Equation

CHAPTER 30

“Eli, rise.”

He’s been dreaming. The van smells like warm bread, freshly cooked in a brick oven in a bazaar back home. The bearded man is ravenous.

“Challah?” Janine says. “Do I pronounce it correctly?”

Tears fill the bearded man’s eyes.

“We’re here,” says the raven-haired women with the perfect teeth and the soft pink lips and the evil glow in her eyes. She looks tantalizing, like treif, succulent nonkosher food.

How long has the bearded man been asleep? Not long.

“Where are we?”

“Border of Oakland and Berkeley. You’ve heard of Berkeley?”

“It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” he says. He looks up, stunned at what he sees on this ramshackle street. “Is this a temple?” he asks.

He’s looking out the van window at a modest street-level establishment, no windows, but ornate doors. Hebrew scrawl, four Stars of David. A temple? It is sandwiched between an apartment building that looks abandoned, with a rusted metal jungle gym on the lawn, and a barbecue restaurant that looks like it should be abandoned.

“No. Not an actual temple. It is, what’s the word, a front. We would not do you such an insult by using a holy place. Keep your head covered, Guardian, please,” Janine says. She hands him a prayer shawl.

He clenches his teeth. Who is she to give him such a garment?

“I ask humbly, Guardian,” Janine says. “It is to protect your identity. Because you are a terrorist.”

He looks at her.

“Like me,” she smiles tightly, and opens the door to the van.

Inside, seconds later, his heart bounces, a rabbit in a warren in his chest. Two dozen people sit in the mock congregation, or stand and mingle. When he enters the surprisingly cavernous sanctuary — its size hidden from the street — all eyes turn to the pair.

His first thought: melting pot.

His second: sacrilege.

White faces, light brown ones, a few dark.

Some with yarmulkes, others crosses. One man kneels on a mat, facing his left. Moaning in Arabic, from the Koran.

“Not the tiny cell you imagined,” Janine says.

“Guardians?” gasps the bearded man.

Janine nods.

“Ange,” comes a voice from the back.

“Curatore.” Another.

“Guardianna.” A woman in the back. Mexican accent.

Tears again sting the bearded man’s eyes. It is as he’s heard. A mélange of the most faithful. Brothers and sisters.

The man on the mat stands, he pulls up his pants leg. On his ankle, a tattoo, a lion on its hind legs.

There is rustling at the front of the congregation, a man in all black going up the stairs to an ark.

“The covenant,” Eli says.

The covenant.

What was agreed upon by God and Abraham. Only through adherence to the word of God will all the nations of the Earth be blessed.

The covenant. No compromise.

Eli looks at the ark, which the man in all black has opened. Sitting inside on soft purple felt is not the Bible, not the Torah, but a metallic cylinder. It is hollow in the middle. A hole that could contain a very large Tootsie Roll or a loaf of freshly baked sourdough bread.

He knows that shape. It’s the shape of the black object he’s been carrying in the backpack. The insides, the guts of the atomic weapon.

He turns to Janine and he sees that light in her eyes, the demonic light. He holds the backpack tight and thinks he might run.

The man who had been kneeling on a mat muttering from the Koran rises. “We don’t have much time, Eli.”

Janine clears her throat. The assembled look in her direction. Clearly, she is a leader here. The leader? It’s not clear to the bearded man.

“We have work to do,” Janine says. “There are complications.”

There are murmurs.

“Guardians!” she commands them. They pause and take her in. “I have a puzzle for you, a question: what do you call a black man flying?”

The assembled seem struck, confused. Is she telling them a joke?

The answer comes from a stout woman, hearty, dressed conservatively in a handsome pants suit. “A pilot, you racist.”

It is a joke, and a few of them get it, and laugh.

“Please remember that we are united, Guardians, by our faith, and united we will succeed. Each here knows his or her job. So let us get the divine weapon where it belongs, and put the rest of the pieces in place. You know where to gather, in that beautiful park.”

A voice says: “The Presidio.”

Janine continues but now she quietly addresses Eli. “Join me. I am told we have a particularly special task.”

Her rare combination of beauty and cruelty, a devil’s charisma, causes him to take a step backward. And then follow her out the door.