The Illumination (31 page)

Dodging the distraught residents now jamming the streets, he burst into a run.

 

Ben Gurion Airport

Tel Aviv

 

One minute the air traffic controller was sipping black coffee, his eyes pinned to his screen as he juggled communications with the five incoming pilots, tracking their planes as they blipped across his monitor. The next he was gaping at a blank screen. His headset was eerily silent.

“
Down!
”

“It's all down!”

“What in God's name happened?”

All the air traffic controllers were shouting at once. In an instant, all visual and verbal contact with planes flying in and out of Israel had ended inexplicably.

The supervisor grabbed the phone, desperate for help. But
the phones were down, too. Landlines and cell phones alike. Useless.

“Why aren't the backup generators kicking in? We've got no lights, no phones, no GPS,
no nothing
!”

White-knuckled, the controllers glanced fearfully at the planes circling overhead. Praying. Wondering.

Was this a temporary glitch? Or a plot? Terrorism?

But there was no way to know. They couldn't communicate with anyone outside of the control tower. And there were hundreds of lives at stake up there in the air.

Two planes were already into their descents.

Please, God, help us. What is going on?

 

Amman Queen Alia International Airport

Jordan

 

The control tower shift supervisor frantically tried to raise the silent system. He'd never before seen a situation like this one, where all the screens were blank, all the communications down.

He knew solar flares could cause these kinds of disruptions, but there'd been no warnings of any such thing. Again he tried the phone, desperate to reach his superiors or to contact the ground traffic controllers, but the phones were still not working.

Nothing was working, not the electricity, not the GPS tracking, not the cell towers. His shirt soaked now, he switched rapidly between the radio frequencies—all to no avail.

A sickening thought came to him.
Can all the satellites be down?

Fighting the panic filling his chest, he prayed those 747s wouldn't end up slamming into each other like blinded gulls.
Insha'allah,
they would all land safely—before they ran out of fuel.

 

As the light surged from the damaged pendant, Natalie felt shock radiating through her body. Hasan and Sayyed fell back, instinctively throwing their arms across their faces to protect
their eyes, but Natalie stared, mesmerized by the stunning clarity of the light.

A moment later, as Hasan's pupils adjusted to the slim dazzling rays, he grabbed up the pliers and bent over the cracked pendant yet again.

She watched helplessly as he wedged the tool into the opening to force Daniel's protective golden shell farther apart.

The bulbs began flickering again. She glanced at them, a new apprehension coming over her.
Oh, God, it's more than just an ancient pendant. I don't believe what I'm seeing
. . .

With an effort, she found her voice. “You don't know what you're doing,” she croaked. “What you're unleashing. That light is ancient, it's . . . God's.”

“Shut up!”

Yet Hasan glanced up and hesitated a moment before he dug into the pendant once again.

“Do you see what's happening? Look what it's doing to the lightbulbs!”

He ignored her, wedging the pliers deeper.

But she had a tool, too. Her knowledge. She understood more about the Middle Eastern belief system surrounding the evil eye than Hasan realized. Most Westerners would have no idea how his blue eyes would have affected him within his culture, but she knew those eyes had marked him his entire life as a man to be feared, a man who could curse another with a single glance, intentionally or not. She'd noticed how Sayyed scrupulously avoided looking at Hasan's eyes, and she knew the reason for it.

“The Eye of Dawn has far more power than your blue eyes,” she burst out. “It will reflect your curses back at you. See how it's disrupting the lights? It must be doing the same thing to the energy field above us—at the Temple Mount. Your plans are going to fail.”

He spun then, turning the full fury of those sparking blue eyes on her. “One more word and I'll take this pliers to your tongue.”

He meant it.

Natalie fell silent. But she continued to meet those glaring
eyes, refusing to look away, showing him that the curses he thought he was raining on her didn't frighten her. That his stare didn't have the power to make her tremble.

As he resumed his attack on the pendant, she watched in silent agony, unable to tear her gaze from the growing beam of light flooding in a luminous stream from the jeweled shell.

No human eyes have seen this in three thousand years.
Now she was trembling from head to toe, unable to stop herself. Not from fear, but from awe. Under other circumstances, she'd have whispered the
shehechiyanu
prayer to thank God for keeping her alive to reach this day, this moment, for allowing her to witness this miraculous sight. But it hardly seemed appropriate to thank God for this travesty of an unveiling. Not when this ancient treasure from His own hands had fallen into the hands of a madman.

A madman who had almost succeeded in separating the two halves of the pendant just as the lightbulbs stopped flickering. They glowed intensely for a second, like a power surge after a brownout, and then they went completely dark.

Because of the pendant . . . the
tzohar . . .

As Hasan pried the final bits of ancient solder free, the illumination surging from within the pendant expanded, filling the tunnel like a widening floodlight.

Natalie gasped when Hasan drew a small shimmering crystal from within the cracked orb. His fingers glowed orange as they clenched it against his palm, the light streaking in narrow rays from between his nearly luminous fingers.

It emitted a radiance far richer than full daylight. It illuminated every crevice, every crumb of earth, every dust mote floating in the dank underground chamber. Staring as if hypnotized, Natalie could well imagine how the
tzohar
had illuminated the ark against the blackness of the sky and the sea during those forty days and forty nights of apocalyptic doom.

Doom.
The sense of it grew in her as the terrorist gripped God's creative light in his palm. He was staring at it in dazed triumph. Sayyed stood dumbstruck.

“Praise be to Allah, the most compassionate, the merciful one,” Hasan whispered, clamping the
tzohar
against his chest.
She could barely catch his faint words. “With the weapons we can create from the ancient power of this holy stone there will be no nation on earth able to oppose us—none capable of stopping the rule of the khalifate.”

He took a step toward Natalie. His indigo eyes seared into her like blue flames as he dangled the
tzohar
before her, taunting her.

“Good-bye, Natalie Landau. Take a good look. This is the last glimpse of light you'll ever see.”

And on those words he scooped up the leather pouch from the table and strode off down the tunnel.

She watched him and the brilliant light until they disappeared in the distance, leaving her alone with Sayyed, the two of them trapped in darkness so absolute they could see nothing.

 

 

 

Sayyed waited until he was sure Hasan had gone before he groped his way to the table and switched on the headlamp.

“Don't you think it's strange that he wanted you down here to guard me when I obviously can't get away?” Her voice floated toward him in the dimness.

“Shut your mouth or I'll tape that, too.” Sayyed whirled toward the woman on the ground, scowling. Yet something in her words prickled at him. Hasan had insisted he wait with her until only a half hour before the C-4 would be detonated. Why?

Relations between him and Hasan Sabouri had never been good. Even now, after all he'd accomplished, there hadn't been a single word of praise. At least this time, Hasan had found no excuse to beat him.

Whenever he was with the man, it was all he could do to hide his hatred. A hatred mixed with fear. The Bedouins had said it better than most.
The evil eye can send a man to his grave and a camel to the cooking pot.

Am I in my grave now?
Sayyed's armpits dampened.

Natalie noted the subtle shift of emotions twitch across her guard's face. Doubt. Anger. Fear.

“He dislikes you, doesn't he? He treats you like a dog.”

Sayyed flinched at the truth. He could listen to no more. He grabbed up the tape.

But even as he ripped a length of it, her words flew faster.

“He's moving up the time of the explosion, you know that, don't you? You're going to die down here right beside me. But neither one of us has to die. You can release me, and we can both live.”

Hatred poured from his eyes.
What if this bitch was right?
He threw the roll of duct tape at her head. It glanced off and rolled away.

“
You're
going to die,
sharmuta.
Make no mistake about that.
I
plan to live.”

He grabbed the headlamp from the table and ran, leaving her once more in absolute darkness.

 

Natalie had lost all sense of time. But she knew the minute hand on her wristwatch was ticking.

Her hands were bound behind her back. Useless. They couldn't pull the fastenings from her ankles or feel how much progress she'd made in stretching the tape that bound her legs together.

She ignored the thirst cleaving her tongue to the roof of her mouth and forced herself to continue flexing and stretching. First her ankles, then her hands. Resting the one, while she worked the other. Pointing her toes forward, pulling them back. Twisting them to the sides and then straining her wrists as far apart as the tape would allow, wriggling them, one forward, one back, slowly, ever so slowly, loosening the bonds.

If she could free her hands first, she could rip the tape from her feet. If she could free her feet first, she could get to that table, grab the tools. And use them to free her wrists.

How long has it been? How much time is left?

Where's the
tzohar
now?

And how do I stop those bombs?

 

 

 

Ahmad wasn't at home when D'Amato arrived. He sat on the stoop trying to tune out the growing confusion percolating through the streets, then worked off his anxiety pacing in front of Ahmad's small house on Hagai Street—better known here, closer to the Damascus Gate, as El-Wad.

Was Ahmad at the mosque? D'Amato didn't remember the time of afternoon prayers. Then he realized just how distracted his thinking had become. El-Wad was filled with men grumbling over the loss of power. They'd all be at the mosque instead if it was time for prayer.

He was almost ready to give up and leave when he caught sight of Ahmad at last, rounding the corner, spotting him, coming forward with a smile of surprise.

“All power is down—throughout the city, it appears.” Ahmad ushered D'Amato into his dim living room. The shades had been drawn against the strong afternoon sun, and the pleasant room with its high ceilings and white-washed walls was draped in semidarkness.

“It is very bad. After all this time and planning, no one will be able to see the summit live on TV,” the Palestinian said, his face troubled.

“If there
is
a summit.” D'Amato spoke quietly. His mind
kept turning over the possibility that the power outage was no accident, that it was part of someone's plan to disrupt the signing of the treaty. But whose?

His host stared at him, then gestured for him to take a seat on the worn striped sofa. “You think the blackout signals a problem?”

“You've got your ear to the ground, my friend. What have
you
heard?”

Ahmad's angular face grew increasingly troubled as he settled into a cane-backed chair. “I've heard some things.” He shrugged. “But didn't give them much credence. Until now. We know there are some who oppose bin Khoury, oppose this accord. But most of us welcome it. It is time to coexist in peace.”

“The Guardians of the Khalifah oppose it.”

Ahmad snorted. “They oppose anything that smacks of democracy. Of freethinking, of choice. They would choose for you, for me, for everyone.” He cleared his throat. “May I offer you some tea? My stove is gas. I can still heat water. And there are figs and grapes in the kitchen—”

“Thank you for your hospitality, but there's no time.” D'Amato struggled to contain his impatience as his fear for Natalie forced him to risk offending his host. “I'm looking for a woman—an American. She's in trouble, Ahmad. She's carrying something the Guardians of the Khalifah covet. They'll kill her for it—they may already have.”

“Then I'm sorry for you. I know very little of the comings and goings of the Guardians of the Khalifah.”

D'Amato studied his gaunt, intelligent face. “But you know something.”

From outside, the shouting seemed to have increased. The streets were still flooded with people, with confusion. Horns blared, adding to the noise and chaos and D'Amato's own agitation.

Ahmad was strangely silent.

“Tell me, Ahmad. Please. If you know anything that can lead me to the Guardians of the Khalifah, or if you've heard
anything about the abduction of an American woman, I need you to tell me now.”

 

She was almost there. She'd managed to stretch the tape enough to twist it into a figure eight.

Hunched on the floor, her muscles aching, Natalie focused solely on extracting one foot from the bindings. She nearly wept as she finally pulled her right foot free.