The driver tapped the steering wheel absently, musing over the clue to a crossword puzzle, the rhythmic noise helping to regulate the racing heart of the passenger.
A call received from an operative within Shin Bet, the Israeli Internal Security Ministry had pinpointed the location of the American national known as Carl Walters. A presumed alias, associated to his Interpol data card, was flagged in Ben Gurion airport that morning. Two strike teams were hastily assembled for an insurgency into the Talpyiot district of the city. Warnings were circulated to their contacts within Mossad and their CIA counterparts in Israel to stand down from activities in the area that evening, but the responses were not favourable.
If the security agencies could not be persuaded to turn a blind eye, it would make their job harder. It was already determined the secret services of seven European countries were within five hundred meters of their intended target. Without a complete shutdown of the local intelligence chatter, their potential involvement could not be predicted.
What infuriated the passenger most was that Talpyiot was important, but not for the reasons the people who guarded it so closely thought. This entire country was built on a myth, one that even the passengers supposed superiors held lingering beliefs toward.
The Ark was close. At some point, there would be a reckoning. Thousands of years of hopes and dreams would cascade down to a single beat of time. Ensuring the correct moment was picked to be present for that singularity was vital. The items would be there, either captured to be brought along in person, or transported by those who carried them now. A fog, one on which the works of centuries drifted was beginning to clear. The decisions made before would soon be validated, and the carefully woven tapestry of a life’s work would finally be given back to the light.
An eager ambivalence descended through the layers of thought; joy, pain, recollection, and doubt enrapturing the cognitive response and dissolving the last remnants of a previous existence.