The Last Day (60 page)

Feldman slid out of the car, grabbed his equipment bag and leaned back in through the side window. “Okay, Arnie, I'll check this out. If all goes well I'll signal for Breck. We'll keep in touch by cellular phone once we're settled inside.”

“Check.” Bollinger gave Feldman the thumbs-up. “Be careful now. I don't have to tell you it could get rough in there.”

Feldman returned the gesture, smiled grimly, and trotted over to address the corporal. In a few minutes he was receiving papers and waving Hunter to join him.

After repeating the formalities with the cameraman, the corporal picked up what looked like an empty coffee can, and along with three soldiers, silently escorted the two newsmen through the huge gate. Once inside, the reporters could see, high above the dense crowd, a platform erected at the northeastern end of the plaza, flush against the great East Wall. Unfortunately, Feldman and Hunter were being led in the opposite direction.

“I don't suppose there's any way we might influence you toward a better location?” Hunter suggested to the young corporal, flipping the corners of a large bankroll. Without losing her stride, she looked first at the money, then at Hunter, pulled the bolt on her rifle and silently continued on her way.

“Maybe I should've offered my body,” Hunter whispered to Feldman, loud enough for the officer to hear.

It was slow going through the standing-room-only crowd of chanting, singing, praying millenarians. The entire quadrangle was a sea of mixed cults, ethnicities and ages. It reminded Feldman of the eclectic crowd he'd witnessed the night of Millennium Eve, only the mood here was considerably more intense.

Passing out of the plaza into the heart of the Old City, the party crossed several narrow alleys, turned down a side street and then stopped in front of what appeared to be an old four-story warehouse. It bore on its door the same bold, yellow signage, in multiple languages, that appeared on the other buildings nearby: “Roof access prohibited as of 4.20.2000 by order of the IDF. Violators subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment.”

The corporal withdrew a key from her breast pocket and unlocked the door. “Up here,” she said, motioning with the muzzle of her gun toward a dark, dank stairwell. Her adjutants stood aside to guard the entryway and the two newsmen accompanied her up four flights of wooden stairs all the way to the rooftop. Swinging open a door, they stepped out into a cool breeze.

“The roof is bad over here.” She gestured with her gun to her left. “So keep to your right and you'll be fine. The street-level door locks from the inside, so you shouldn't be disturbed. When you finish, let yourself out as you came. There are no toilet facilities.” She dropped the coffee can to the roof. “Use this as necessary and carry your waste away with you. Any questions?”

“Will you be back to walk us home?” Hunter flirted.

She looked the big man up and down with a raised eyebrow and snorted, “I would rather experience doomsday!” Both Hunter and Feldman burst out laughing, appreciating the break in the tension. This was not shared by Corporal Lyman, who wasted no time ducking back into the darkness of the stairwell.

Hunter hooked a thumb in the direction of her departure. “From the Goene school of charisma,” he smirked, and began unloading his equipment.

Feldman walked out toward the edge of the roof in the direction of the stage to survey the scene. He saw that their budding was connected directly to the one in front of them, one story below him, which was connected to the budding in front of it, and so on. From the looks of things, the two newsmen could work their way from roof to roof to the very front row of buildings at the perimeter of the huge quadrangle. If the opportunity presented itself. Beyond the rooftops, directly adjacent to the stage, Feldman was comforted to see a military helicopter resting on its pad.

As the mystery voice on the phone had promised, the stage in the Wailing Wall plaza was certainly visible from here, but it must have been a good hundred meters away. All of the other news crews were far better situated on the periphery of the plaza, either on the surrounding walls, or on the tops of buildings at the edge of the open common. No one was set as far back as WNN.

“We're not going to get any decent audio from up here,” Feldman stated the obvious.

“No,” Hunter agreed. “Headquarters will just have to fall back on simulcast audio from some other network, like we anticipated. But hopefully, you and I'll be able to hear her speech. They've got a decent sound system set up on the stage,” he pointed over at the series of horizontal, two foot by eight foot speaker boxes placed on their sides along the front of the platform.

“What do you make of the empty rooftops out there?” Feldman asked. He guessed he was standing on the sixth row of buildings back from the edge of the plaza, and was surprised to see that there were no spectators on any of the roofs in front of them. The viewpath was deserted.

Hunter dropped a camera case and walked over next to Feldman. “Hmmph. Bad roofs, like the corporal told us? Or maybe security. See how we look down a bit on the platform from up here? That would make it easy to lob a rocket or grenade over the top of the glass shield. All the windows facing out onto the square are probably stationed with militia. But I don't know why the hell they couldn't have gotten us a little closer, anyway.”

“I guess we're lucky to be here at all,” Feldman conceded.

Hunter pulled up a tripod and positioned his camera on top. “Yeah, only I don't like the angle. I'm too low. I can't get you and the speaker's platform in the same shot.”

Feldman walked over to squint through the lens. “What do you suggest?”

“Well, with all the open access in front of us, maybe we should just try moving a little closer?”

Feldman considered this for a moment and then observed the large number of Israeli military stationed around the perimeter areas. “No,” he sighed. “If we get kicked out of here, WNN will be completely dark on this whole event. We'd better play it safe.”

Hunter peered around and fastened his gaze on the higher roof of the building behind them to their left “Up there,” he proposed. “Let me see what it looks like from up there. You hand the camera up to me.”

Before Feldman could object, Hunter was off. “Watch out for the roof,” he called after him.

The new position worked perfectly, Hunter decided. He could hold Feldman full frame and then adroitly zoom in over his shoulder, directly into the stage and speaker.

“I don't like the looks of those clouds,” Feldman observed, casting his eyes on the sky. “You're target practice if a lightning storm kicks up suddenly, you know.”

“No problem. I'll skinny offa here slicker ‘n shit if I have to,” Hunter assured him. “Come on, give me a hand with the rest of the stuff.”

As the appointed hour for Jeza's appearance drew near, Feldman made one more attempt to reach Anke on his cellular phone. This time he got through, only to encounter the answering machine. He left a detailed message of where he was, phone numbers and how he might be reached later. He pleaded with Anke to contact him soon, given that he might be leaving for Switzerland tonight. Frustrated, he snapped shut the phone and returned it to his pocket.

And then, without warning, the two newsmen were suddenly alerted to Jeza's presence by the eruptive excitement of the crowd. From nowhere, it would seem, the prophetess had appeared on the platform, unannounced, and was taking her place on the stand behind an array of microphones. In a panic, Hunter scrambled up to his perch on the rooftop. Feldman, captivated by her arresting image once more, had to force himself to turn away from the vision and return to his work. He took his place below and well out in front of the cameraman.

“How's my audio?” Feldman called into his wireless lapel mike.

“Fine,” the word came back through his ear set. “Hold for a sec while I clear our signal.”

Feldman's ear set went quiet momentarily, and then Hunter's voice crackled back. “Okay, we've got a green light. Go ahead and do your intro and just ad-lib until she starts her speech.”

That could take a while, as the crowd showed no intention of diminishing the volume of its wild welcome. Feldman, his back reluctantly to the stage, brushed off his coat, cleared his throat and addressed the camera. He got a hand cue from Hunter and began.

“This is Jon Feldman reporting live for WNN from historic Wailing Wall Square in Jerusalem. As you can see from the masses of faithful celebrating behind us here, this is a major event in the continuing story of the young visionary who calls herself Jeza.”

As Feldman opened his mouth to take his next breath, a huge cry welled up from the crowd. He turned to see Jeza raising her hands behind the transparent blast shield in what he assumed was a greeting to the crowd, or perhaps a plea for quiet.

The roar for Jeza was deafening now. It rose up from within the square and set off a chain reaction along the encircling hills of Jerusalem, blackened with the presence of five million witnesses to this supreme event. Jeza stretched her arms out to the crowd and finally, like the aftermath of an explosion, the cacophony rumbled to absolute stillness.

At length she lowered her arms and spoke out in a loud, authoritative voice that projected from the loudspeakers and echoed across the landscape of the Holy Land.

“In the name of the Father, I come to you!” she began in her well-known entrée. The crowd erupted again, but she forged on, not encouraging their interruption. This time her speech was in English only, as if she had too much to say to belabor her delivery. The crowd immediately quieted again.

“I have spoken to you of the liberation of the soul,” she called out in a commanding voice. “I have spoken to you of the need to abolish your dependence on others for spiritual instruction that you may arrive at your own meaning of scripture. And I have warned you to leave your churches and temples and mosques and to abandon your religious leaders, as the direction they give you misleads you from God's truths.

“Today, I bring the Final Word that you might understand.” She paused and took a deep breath, as did the crowd.

“In the beginning, God prepared for you great blessedness,” she continued in her angelic voice. “A unity of heaven and earth and life eternal. It was God's plan, then, that all mankind should forever share in the glory and joys of paradise. But man was not ready for this great gift. In pride did mankind fail to recognize the sacredness of this unity. Of his own free will, man rejected God.

“And so came the fall from grace, when God divided life from death, and the earth from the heavens, and humanity from divinity. And man was banished to roam the wilderness, lost and alone.

“Yet even after the fall, God prepared a plan of redemption so that one day you should again partake completely in the wonder of His divine perfection. This plan did God set before you in the visions of the prophets. And in the messages of the Messiahs did God further reveal His intent:

“That man should learn and grow in the ways of the Lord, and work toward the day of the Final Judgment when the worthy might again be allowed to experience the unity of God in life. God left man with the promise that, at the Judgment, He would come again to reign with the righteous on earth. Until that time, only through death would man be reunited with the Almighty.

“But man has been slow to prepare himself for Judgment. He has been wayward in his journey toward righteousness. He has misunderstood and ignored the messengers of God. He has foundered and struggled in his understanding of God's intent.

“Thus have I come to you to carry forward the Word so that you may at last find your way back to the Father. For only in knowing the Word shall you close the abyss which separates you still.

“In the Word shall you recognize the enduring disharmony
that divides you from yourselves!
Hear the Word and understand. For, behold, I am the Anointed Messenger. I am the New Meaning. I am the final chapter of the New Testament…

“I am the Book of the Apotheosis!”

With this ringing declaration, the turbulent, brooding clouds above the prophetess were rent by an enormous shear of lightning. The multitudes dropped to the ground in abject terror as the earth reverberated from the deafening, apocalyptic peal. But Jeza was unfazed and unblinking.

“I speak to you of the great iniquities that prolong your fall from grace,” she called out to them as the thunder faded and the cries of alarm escalated. “I speak of the ungodly separations of man from humanity!”

Collecting themselves and calming under the Messiah's continuing sermon, the masses regrouped and refocused.

“At the fall from grace,” she pressed on, “God ordained the separation between Himself and mankind. Yet, after the fall, man took it upon himself to create further divisions, unnatural and prideful in their conception, and blasphemous in the eyes of the Lord. In these unnatural divisions, man first chose to set himself above his mate, separating himself from woman, whom God had created as equal and counterpart.

“Over the millennia, man has sought to lend sanction to this wrongful division by corrupting the very Word of God. In the Book of Genesis, chapters two and three, woman is portrayed as secondary in creation; subservient to Adam; the perpetrator of original sin; the seductress who tempts Adam to taste of the forbidden fruit, thereby bringing about mankind's fall from grace.

“I say to you, the debased meaning of this book is the foremost of the many corruptions of the scriptures. These passages were first given to you as a holy message of the general and of the symbolic. Yet, has the true meaning been abandoned, reduced to the specific and the literal.

“Be it known to all that, in the true progression of life on this earth, it was the female form that came first. In the beginning, God created the primitive organisms. And in His design, He created them female one and all. Cell begetting cell, female begetting female. It is only later in time that maleness emerges, male issuing from female.

“And it is only later in time that man, as the hunter and protector, surpasses woman in strength and prowess. And then deigns to wield his powers to hold dominion over woman. Yet, when woman attempts to offset lesser strength with greater wit, she is condemned for her cunning.