Brink of Chaos (10 page)

“So, Cal, your mother’s doing well?”

Cal Jordan nodded politely. He was still coming to grips with the fact he was sitting across from the former first lady of the United States. A guy who looked like a Secret Service agent was posted just outside the lavish sunroom with its curved wall of glass and its view of the trees and gardens outside. This was all too surreal. Cal had racked his brain to sort out the reason behind this meeting but couldn’t get to first base. He asked himself,
Why me?

He did have one guess. A little more than two years earlier, before the president’s health problems, Corland had made a dramatic turn in his policies, much to the chagrin of his vice president, Jessica Tulrude. As part of that reversal, President Corland had decided to honor Joshua at the White House for his bravery in foiling the terrorist-led hostage plot the year before at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Perhaps that was the point of connection — particularly because Cal himself had been the hostage, handpicked by the terrorist in an unsuccessful effort to pressure Joshua into giving up his RTS design plans.

But now that his dad had been exiled from the United States, Cal wondered whether Corland wanted him to be a messenger to his father — or to the Roundtable — or both.

Cal responded to Mrs. Corland. “My mother’s in Washington on legal business today. I tagged along. I’m glad I was close so I could stop in to see you and the president.”

He thought back to the warning in Mrs. Corland’s email that he was to keep their meeting secret. He hadn’t even told his mother. Abigail was meeting with a lawyer in downtown D.C. that day. Ordinarily, she would have included him, but since this meeting was particularly sensitive, Abigail had explained that she had to keep Cal out of it. Before they went their separate ways, Cal only told Abigail that he would be “nosing around town, checking the sites.” Cal had formulated a lame justification in his mind — meeting with a former president and first lady — they were political monuments of sorts, weren’t they?

Rising from her chair, Winnie Corland smoothed her dress. “Well, I will leave you two alone. Virgil is insistent that he speak with you privately.”

Cal rose as well. As he shook her hand, she gave him some last words of instruction. “Virgil communicates better some days than others,” she said. “But even if he can’t tell you everything on his mind … his heart … I am sure he appreciates having the company.”

She walked out of the brightly lit sunroom. Now it was just Cal and the former president, who was seated in a wheelchair. He was the same man who had once run the country, but he was pale now and thin, his eyes listless.

After a few moments of silence, Cal started the conversation. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. President.”

Corland took at least half a minute before it looked like he registered. Then he nodded slowly.

“My father speaks highly of you,” Cal added.

Only a blank stare from Virgil Corland.

Cal kept talking. “My dad is Joshua Jordan. He told me about meeting you at the White House, the day that you gave him the Medal of Honor.”

Something in what Cal said, or maybe something else, a random memory perhaps, generated a look of urgency, almost desperation, on Corland’s face. He spoke, hesitantly, with an athletic kind of effort to each word, “I was president once …”

“Yes, that’s right.”

But Corland shook his head, as if trying to move the conversation
away from the cordial and superficial. “Vice President …,” he strained to say.

“Yes, Mrs. Tulrude was vice president then, before she stepped into your shoes … into the Oval Office … when you had your health problems.”

“No, no,” he groaned.

Cal feared that he may have upset him.

Then Corland looked up at his young guest. “Never had … a son.”

“You didn’t?”

Corland shook his head slowly. “Your father. Got the medal. New York …”

“Yes, for saving me in New York. Right. The terrorist who had kidnapped me —”

“But you … too … you too,” he said. There was a twisted, labored attempt at a smile on Corland’s face. “You … brave too … like your fat her.”

“I was just the victim …,” Cal said.

“No. No. I read … the … reports … FBI.” Then Corland added, “Brave,” and when he said that word, he lifted his right hand and pointed a limp finger right at Cal’s chest and gathered up an earnest expression. “Brave,” he said again. Then Corland took a deep breath as if he were going to swim underwater. “Tulrude. What happened … no, oh no.” But he ran out of breath. His head dropped to one side, as if a string had been cut.

The day nurse from the other side of the room quickly made her way over to Corland. “I think, young man, that the president has had enough for today. He’s still quite fragile.”

Cal reached over and rested his hand on the wrinkled hand of the former president and said good-bye. As he turned to leave, Cal heard three words, barely audible, from Corland’s dry lips.

“Come … back … again.”

Abigail stirred her Cobb salad with a fork. She wasn’t hungry, but she had to go through the motions — the perfunctory professional
lunch — to wrangle this meeting with Harley Collingwood, the lawyer now sitting across from her.

Since both had been trial attorneys in D.C., they swapped stories about arguing cases in the District. Collingwood said he knew about her work in Harry Smythe’s prestigious law firm and had heard secondhand about her being a top-tier litigator. They exchanged law-school jokes, keeping everything light, amiable.

Eventually Collingwood pushed his plate away and said, “Okay, Abigail, I know you didn’t come all the way to D.C. for a nice salad, some chit-chat, and to exchange law-practice war stories with me.” She let him continue. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think you found out I just left the Department of Justice and know I was on the prosecution team, going after your husband in his criminal case. So here you are …”

Abigail kept a pleasant, interested, but nonplused look on her face. She let him go on.

“And,” he said, “you’d probably love it if I were to slip you some helpful information about your husband’s case.”

She was silent for a moment, then asked a simple but disarming question. “Have you found work?”

“Of course,” Collingwood shot back.

“Which firm?”

He hesitated. “Consulting for a few different offices. I’m picky.”

“In other words,” Abigail said with steely calm, “you have not found steady work since you voluntarily left your position at the DOJ, where you were the second highest assistant attorney general in the criminal division. Harley, my point is, you’d been handpicked by Attorney General Cory Hamburg himself, and you left all that — voluntarily — so you could be picky in looking around for other employment?”

Collingwood stiffened. “My law practice is really none of your business.”

“True,” she said, “but justice is. And so is the truth. If I know anything about you, the truth is your business too. You’re regarded as one of the most aggressive prosecutors in Washington — and one of the most ethical. I need your help. My guess is that you discovered
something rotten in the prosecution of my husband — so rotten that it led you to report it to DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility.” The former prosecutor was stone-still, listening. Abigail continued, “But knowing what I do about Attorney General Hamburg and his deference to the Tulrude administration, I’m betting he made sure that OPR stuck your ethics complaint in the permanent out basket. Which put you in a real dilemma.”

Collingwood still didn’t move a muscle.

“Now that you’re out of the DOJ, either you can keep what you know to yourself and see an innocent man — my husband — hunted down around the globe for the rest of his life by federal authorities and railroaded with phony criminal charges … and maybe you could salve your conscience by saying that by your silence you’re actually protecting DOJ’s privilege of lawyer’s confidentiality. Or else, and here’s the kicker, you will actually have to
do
something about what you know — tell someone — someone who can take your information and do what ought to be done. For justice and for truth.”

Abigail looked Harley Collingwood squarely in the eye. “Have I stated the matter accurately, counselor?”

Joshua’s mind had been fixed like a metal rivet on the test he had just witnessed at the IDF weapons site. His RTS system had failed. Again. Not that it hadn’t reversed the test missile and sent it back to its point of launching. The problem was, for some reason, it had not captured the guidance system in the nosecone completely, so that the ground crew could manipulate its flight and send it in new directions. He had already been on the phone with Ted, his senior engineer at the Jordan Technologies headquarters in Manhattan, trying to work out the glitch.

“Don’t worry,” Ted assured him, “we’ll get the kinks out.”

“Without three-sixty capture of the guidance systems of incomings,” Joshua said, “we’ll be slaves to any bad guys who launch from civilian areas, knowing that we wouldn’t send missiles back to a spot where they would wipe out innocent people.”

Joshua rode away from the test site, jostled in the Jeep driven by Colonel Clinton Kinney, his close buddy from the Israeli Defense Forces.

Soon Kinney took a turn in another direction, away from Jerusalem. After a few minutes he pulled to the side of the road and turned off the engine. Joshua realized why.

Kinney pointed to a stretch of desert across the highway. Joshua nodded without saying a word. He momentarily forgot the failed
missile test and everything else. For him, now, it was all coming true. Right in front of him. He was a witness to the unfolding of something incredible.

From the Jeep, Joshua saw hundreds of bearded Orthodox Jews in the distance, in neon green vests, carrying boxes and plastic bags as they wandered the surface of the desert. They were bent over, searching the rough terrain that had recently been made so ruthlessly jagged, filled with volcanic pumice, huge charred boulders, and caverns that had ripped through the ground.

An uninformed visitor might simply have said the land looked ravaged by the recent massive, unprecedented volcanic eruptions and earthquakes — so-called
natural
events. But to the Orthodox who were scouring the land for the human remains of their enemies so that they could arrange the burials — and in fact, for almost every citizen of Israel — it had been a supernatural miracle brought forth by the hand of God.

“What are they called?” Joshua asked, pointing to the men who were collecting the last remains of dead Russian and Turkish soldiers, as well as Sudanese and Libyan.

“They’re part of the ZAKA — a group of Orthodox Jews who for years take on the job of cleaning up the bodily remains after disasters and terrorist bombings. To keep the land ceremonially clean. But this is the largest job they’ve ever had — or will ever have.”

As Joshua surveyed the scene, his mind traveled back. He himself had been caught in the thick of that war, on the border of Israel, just on the other side from Syria when it happened. He remembered how the Russian-Islamic coalition had swept down from the north against the tiny nation of Israel like a rolling storm. At the same time they came up from the south through the Sinai Desert, with their hundreds of thousands of troops, tanks and mobile missile launchers, and hundreds of jets launched from the Russian aircraft carriers anchored off the coast in the Mediterranean.

The invasion looked unstoppable. The IDF headquarters was bracing for a fight to the death, and Israel’s military commanders were convinced that all was lost.

Then the unimaginable had occurred. The earth itself rocked, cracked open, and exploded with a force greater than multiple megaton nuclear detonations.

Joshua had been there, an eyewitness to the awesome display of divine intervention. How could he not believe that this was the long-promised reckoning?

Colonel Kinney eyed the scorched wilderness. “Now that you’re a believer in the prophecies and promises of the Bible,” he said, “you have to admit … this is an incredible sight.”

“I know,” Joshua said, shaking his head, “I was there. Saw it all. Felt it. And barely survived it. Fire in the sky, tremors in the earth. Everything God predicted in Ezekiel 38 and 39, when He described thousands of years ago how he would vanquish the Russian-Islamic invasion of Israel. And that’s exactly what happened. And I lived through it to tell the tale.” After a moment, Joshua continued. “And then this,” he said, pointing to the ZAKA, “just one more proof …”

“Ezekiel 39:12,” Kinney replied. Then he recited it from memory. “‘For seven months the house of Israel will be burying them in order to cleanse the land.’”

“And by my calendar, we’re now in the seventh month, aren’t we?” Joshua asked.

Kinney nodded and touched his finger to the ignition pad on the steering wheel. The Jeep’s engine fired up. “I’m one of those rare things in the IDF — a Jewish follower of Jesus Christ the Messiah — Yeshua … though there are more of us since all this happened,” he said, pointing to the landscape where volcanic cones rose from the desert floor in the distance. He turned toward highway 90 to head north, first along the Dead Sea and then to Jerusalem. Kinney added, “It’s nice to be able to talk about this with someone who understands.” Then he asked, “Your young protégé, Ethan March, he’ll be waiting for us where we dropped him off … back at the bottom of Masada?”

“Right. He wanted to hike to the top. Knowing Ethan, he’ll do the whole thing at a jog. The guy’s a terrific athlete.”

Kinney glanced over at Joshua. “Okay, so, you said you had a high-level political question to ask me. Fire away.”

“Prime Minister Benksy …”

“What about him?”

“How well do you know him?”

“Only casually,” McKinney replied. “I’m just a colonel, not a general. I don’t sit in on security meetings. Just the operational stuff. On the other hand, this is a small country. Everyone knows something about everyone.”

“Gotcha.”

Kinney shot another look at Joshua as they picked up speed on highway 90. “Okay, what gives?”

“I’ve got a theological question, which is also a philosophical one, so I need you to put on your philosopher’s hat for a moment.”

“That’s interesting,” Kinney said with a smile. “You’re a former test pilot and a spy-plane hero for the U.S. Air Force, with an engineering degree from MIT and a defensive-weapons designer of some of the most advanced hardware and laser gadgets any military could ask for. You’re one of the bravest guys I’ve ever met … and one of the brightest. But in a mechanical kind of a way. You’re a hyperadvanced sort of technical fix-it guy, an action hero, Mr. Wizard with laser shields. But frankly, not exactly the philosopher type.”

Joshua smiled. “Take away all the superlatives, and I’d say you had me nailed.” Then his face dropped and his eyes fixed on some unseen point on the horizon. “There’s a time and a season for everything.”

“So, ask your question,” Kinney said.

“As followers of Jesus Christ, we believe in the Scriptures. And as one of the few Jewish followers of Jesus in the IDF, you can appreciate that.”

“Sure. Psalm 119 reminds us of that. And several verses in the New Testament.”

“And that includes the prophecies foretold by God,” Joshua added.

Kinney nodded. “Absolutely. First epistle of Peter, chapter one, says the Spirit of Christ moved within the Old Testament prophets and they ‘predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.’ The first chapter of the book of Revelation says, ‘Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are
those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, for the time is near.’ So, yes, I think followers of Christ need to study the
whole
counsel of God in the Bible, prophecy included.”

Joshua chuckled. “Remind me not to play Bible Trivia with you.”

Kinney smiled. “Okay, out with it. What’s up?”

“What if you know that God has foretold something and told us clearly in Scripture that it’s going to occur? You would consider that an expression of His sovereign will, right?”

“Agreed.”

“Unchangeable.”

“Correct.”

“We accept it?”

“You mean as in — don’t take any action that opposes it?”

“Right,” Joshua bulleted back. “Let’s say that something evil, horrendous, is about to happen, and God inspires His prophets to predict that very thing, thousands of years ago in Scripture. And suddenly, you start to see it unfolding — right in front of you. But you have the opportunity, within your sphere of power, to try and stop it, this nightmare. And you are in a situation at the epicenter of converging events to do something about it. So the question is this — do you take that chance?”

Kinney shot back. “You’re still hedging. I’ve never known you not to get to the point, Josh. What’s going on in your head right now?”

“You’ve seen the news, about the United Nations negotiations with the Bensky administration?”

“Sure, more peace proposals.”

“Well, along those lines, Joel Harmon contacted me recently.”

“The fighter pilot from the Knesset?”

“Right.”

“Contacted you about what?”

“He’s a member of a coalition party, the Hamonah. You know, I’ve heard of the other political parties over here: Likud, Kadima, Shas, Labor. But not that one, until Harmon got hold of me.”

“That’s because it’s new. Just formed after the dust settled from our recent war — the one they’re calling the War of Thunder …”

“Yeah, I heard that.”

Kinney nodded. “… After the verse in first Samuel, chapter two. ‘Those who oppose the Lord will be broken. The Most High will thunder from heaven.’ Anyway, this new political party was named Hamonah based on the verse in Ezekiel about the cleansing of the land. So, Joel Harmon talked to you?”

“We met once. He told me he’s leading the effort to stop Bensky from going along with this U.N. initiative being pushed by Secretary-General Alexander Coliquin.”

“And he’s enlisted you,” Kinney remarked with a studied look on his face. “Smart move. You’re a national hero to a lot of folks-in-the-know here. Your RTS system averted a nuke attack from Iran. They
ought
to love you. So what’s the problem?”

“He wants me to be present when he and his political group meet with Bensky, to convince him to reject the U.N. deal.”

Kinney thought for a moment. “Okay, here’s another verse for you — Psalm 119:46 — ‘I will speak of your statutes before kings and will not be put to shame.’”

“Great verse. Only one problem. For me, it’s not a matter of shame.”

“Then what?”

“Fear.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. You? Afraid of the prime minister of Israel?”

“No. Something else.”

“What?”

“God.”

Kinney fell silent.

Joshua explained. “I don’t want to do anything that would go against God’s sovereign plan. I don’t want to get in the way. There’s something dark and evil coming. It’s almost here. I’m not talking politics or international policy. It’s much different. We both know that. Something more monstrous than anything the world has ever witnessed. And for the first time in my life, I feel paralyzed. Conflicted. Undecided which way to turn. I’m afraid of making a colossal mistake — of biblical proportions.”

Then he motioned toward the huge boulders on the desert floor on the other side of the highway that were covered with a thick layer of volcanic lava from the recent upheaval of the earth.

“I feel like I’m turning to stone.”