A hush came over the room.
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Bennett. “What exactly are you saying?”
Mordechai paused for a moment, then said, “I’m saying the War of Gog and Magog wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning.”
5
SATURDAY, JANUARY 10 – 11:31 p.m. – RESTON, VIRGINIA
It was not the wedding night they had planned.
But there was nothing they could do to change the events of the past few hours, and like all Americans, they were hungry to know more. FOX and CNN soon confirmed the outlines of the story Mordechai had revealed at dinner and began providing details. They broadcast a black-and-white passport photo of the suicide bomber that had been released by the FBI.
The terrorist was Alonzo Cabresi, a twenty-seven-year-old Italian national with ties to an obscure left-wing underground faction based near Rome known as the Legion. The group’s Web site called for the overthrow of the Italian government and the disbanding of NATO. It also claimed responsibility for several assassinations of CEOs and diplomats in Europe over the years but had no history of operating in the U.S. and no obvious motive for today’s attack.
Meanwhile, against the strenuous opposition of the Secret Service, President MacPherson and the First Lady visited the crime scene and comforted survivors at a local hospital before returning to the White House to hold a press conference with Homeland Security Secretary Lee James. James announced a $10 million reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of Cabresi’s coconspirators. He also announced that Reagan National Airport would remain closed for several days but that Washington Dulles would reopen in the morning. The president announced that European Union foreign minister Salvador Lucente was en route from Brussels, ready to “offer the full support of the European police and intelligence services in hunting down the perpetrators of this crime and bringing them to justice.”
But shortly before midnight, Jon and Erin had had all they could take. Emotionally spent, they finally turned off the television and their BlackBerrys and tried their best to set the world’s troubles behind them. And then they lost themselves in each other’s arms for the first time in their lives and found it had been well worth the wait.
* * *
Seven hours later, the sun began to peek through the curtains.
Bennett rubbed his eyes and found himself staring up at the fan on the hotel ceiling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d woken up without an alarm clock or a hotel wake-up call—not since childhood, he was sure—and it felt good. Better yet, he was curled up beside Erin’s warm, comforting body, and for a moment he forgot all the horror unfolding around them. She was even more beautiful asleep—so peaceful, so relaxed, as if she hadn’t a care in the world—and for a while he just lay there staring at her.
Finally he slipped out of the soft cotton sheets as quietly as he could and went into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. Then he clicked on the news, careful to keep the volume low so as not to wake his adorable bride.
It was too early for the Sunday interview shows, but all the broadcast and cable news networks were still wall-to-wall with continuing coverage of the latest terrorist strike. The death toll had climbed from twenty-three to thirty-one, and at least a dozen Washingtonians had multiple serious injuries and were fighting desperately for their lives. Two had been in surgery for most of the night, and doctors were not holding out much hope.
Then the news anchor said something that struck Bennett as curious, though he wasn’t quite sure why. The anchor said that among those who had perished in the bombing was Dr. George Murray, the chief archeologist for the Smithsonian Institution, who had been “expected to travel to Israel later today to meet with Prime Minister David Doron.”
Bennett was pretty sure he had met Murray at a state dinner at the White House a few years back, and he certainly knew of the man’s reputation as one of the world’s leading experts on the ancient Near East. But why would he have been traveling to Israel right now—to meet personally with Doron, no less—with everything else that was going on in the world?
And there was something else. Bennett had a vague recollection of reading about another prominent archeologist—Mansfield or Manchester, some name like that—who had recently died somewhat mysteriously in London. Was he remembering that right? If so, was there a connection, or was it just an odd coincidence?
He made a mental note to track down the story, but then a report came on profiling the strange, sordid history of the Legion, and Bennett turned up the sound. In all his time at the White House and crisscrossing the globe for the president, he had never even heard of this group. So why were they crawling out of their hole now?
* * *
Erin began to stir.
She kissed her new husband on the neck and whispered, “Come back to bed.”
“I thought you’d want to know what was happening,” Bennett said as he jotted down notes about the Legion: “founded in ’71, funded by drug money . . . ”
“I don’t,” she said in a seductive whisper.
“You don’t?” he asked, turning to look at her now.
“Nope.”
Jon hit the Mute button. “You are the same woman I married yesterday, right?”
“I say we go through political detox,” Erin said softly. “No talking about the news. No watching the news. No papers. No magazines. No BlackBerrys. No checking our voice mail or e-mail for the entire honeymoon. Let’s go cold turkey.”
“Cold turkey?” he asked, bewildered.
“It’s better than cold showers, right?” She smiled.
Now he was completely confused. “But yesterday, you practically wanted to . . . ”
Erin leaned forward and put her finger to his lips. “That was yesterday,” she whispered. “Now I know what I’ve been missing all these years.” She caressed his face. “This is the only honeymoon we’re ever going to get. Who knows how much time we’ve got left? Let’s enjoy it.”
Bennett didn’t need to be asked twice. The world would have to wait.
* * *
They ate a long, lingering breakfast in bed.
Then they showered, dressed casually, and took a car service to Washington Dulles Airport. For their honeymoon, Bennett had promised to surprise Erin. And sure enough, she was surprised.
With their bags packed, they were standing in front of the Departures board when Bennett asked, “So, where would you like to go?”
“I’m sorry?” asked Erin.
“Where would you like to go?” he repeated.
“What are you talking about?”
“Name a place—anyplace in the world—and that’s where I’ll take you.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you were going to surprise me.”
“I am. You can go anywhere in the world!”
Erin just looked at him for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or to punch him in the nose. No plane tickets? No destination? No hotel reservations? Nothing? What kind of honeymoon was that? What kind of . . .
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jon said.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you really don’t.”
“Yes, I really do.”
“All right, Mr. Know-It-All, what am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking, What kind of moron surprises his new bride with no tickets, no reservations, zip, zilch, nada, nothing?”
All right, maybe he did know what she was thinking. But that still didn’t excuse . . .
Bennett suddenly pulled out his BlackBerry.
“Hey, I thought we weren’t going to use those on our honeymoon,” Erin said.
“I’ve got my travel agency on standby. They’re ready to make all the arrangements. Just name the destination, and they’ll have first-class tickets within minutes, the ritziest accommodations, the finest service, all the amenities, and no one will even know where we are.”
Erin thought ab
out that for a moment. She had never had the time, or the money, or the freedom to just look at a Departures board and pick any place in the world to go. Nor had she ever had someone to share it, even if it had been possible.
But now, for the first time in her life, time wasn’t an issue. They didn’t have jobs. They didn’t have kids or a care in the world. No one was counting on them for anything but a postcard. Cost wasn’t an object either. They had money in the bank from Jon’s years on Wall Street—$22 million and change, to be precise. Why not go a little crazy? They could be gone for a week or a month or a year or more, if they wanted. Let Corsetti and Rajiv and Costello handle the nightmares. The Bennetts had served their time, and they were done.
“Anywhere?” Erin asked again, just to be sure.
“Anywhere,” Bennett said.
She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Ronda.”
* * *
The little resort town held a special place in her heart.
Nestled in the hills of southern Spain, Ronda was the birthplace of Spanish bullfighting, an occasional home for Ernest Hemingway at the peak of his writing career, and more importantly, the last place Erin had vacationed with her parents as a little girl before her father was killed in the mountains east of Kabul. It was quiet and serene and filled with bittersweet memories of the perfect life that once was hers. She had never mentioned it to Jon.
A few minutes later, Jon was off the phone. He took her by the hand and led her to the British Airways desk. There he handed over his credit card, purchased two first-class tickets, and explained the journey ahead.
“If it pleases you, my lady,” Bennett began, “we will board Flight 918 aboard a Boeing 747, leaving Washington at 6:10 p.m. and landing at London Heathrow at 6:20 tomorrow morning. There, we will transfer to British Airways Flight 6982—an Airbus A320—leaving at 7:55 a.m. local time for Málaga on the southern coast of Spain, better known as the Costa del Sol. When we touch down in Málaga at 11:35 a.m. local time, we will be picked up by a limousine and driven to the lovely mountain resort town of Ronda, which, I might add, is the birthplace of Spanish bullfighting. I’ve reserved the honeymoon suite at the city’s most beautiful hotel, the Husa Reina Victoria de Ronda. Our room overlooks the mountains of Andalusia and will be filled with roses and the best champagne in the country. How does all that sound?”
“Magical,” said Erin, her eyes sparkling.
6
MONDAY, JANUARY 12 – 4:24 a.m. – LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Barry Jaspers was a desperate man.
He glanced at his watch again and kicked a stray shoe across the bedroom floor. He had already finished packing his suitcase and had stuffed his briefcase with research papers that still needed grading. But no keys meant no car. No car meant no flight. He certainly didn’t have the time to call for a cab if he was going to get to LAX in time for the 8:35 nonstop to Washington Dulles. So Jaspers bit his lip and kept hunting.
His wife, Leigh Ann, turned over and pulled the covers over her head. The last thing he wanted was to wake her. At forty-three, she was six months pregnant with “The Surprise” and needed all the sleep she could get.
Jaspers, known to most of his friends simply as Professor, was just shy of his fifty-eighth birthday. A widower before he met Leigh Ann, he had two grown sons and had been sure he was done with bottles and diapers. Now he was back at the starting line. His colleagues on campus were giving him a hard time. The truth was it had been a long time since there had been a baby in his arms, and the idea of going through it one more time with Leigh Ann, the woman who had rescued his heart and soul from the depths of despair, actually excited him, though he was loath to admit it to anyone else. He had not exactly been the best father to his boys. But maybe this time he could do it right. He certainly wanted to try.
For now, though, all he wanted was to find his keys. He had already checked the bedroom and the master bath. He raced back downstairs to the kitchen, checking drawers and counters and Leigh Ann’s purse in an increasingly frantic hunt.
Jaspers cursed himself for booking a morning flight. Ever since his days as an undergraduate, he had hated getting up early. Back then, of course, it was because he was too hungover to get out of bed before noon. Now he was just getting old and lazy. He hated rush-hour traffic. He hated long security lines at the airport. The only thing he hated more was funerals. But what choice did he have? If he was going to make the viewing this evening and the memorial service tomorrow, he had to catch this flight.
George Murray had been his best friend for almost forty years. They had met as roommates at Johns Hopkins University. They had been Fulbright scholars at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Together they had traveled the world, hunting down rare artifacts, speaking at archeology conferences, begging foundations for grant money, and helping each other write just enough journal articles and books to keep out of trouble. It was impossible to believe he was gone.
Even more impossible to believe was the way he had died. Violently. Horribly. In a suicide bombing less than a block from the White House. How could something like that happen? Murray had no enemies. He was incapable of creating them. Everybody liked the guy, right down to the doorman in his building and the janitors who kept his section of the Smithsonian shipshape. It made absolutely no sense.
What would happen to the project? to the book? They’d been working on both in secret for months. Not even their wives knew what they were doing, how far they had come, or how close they were to the most spectacular archeological find of all time. Could he carry it off without George? He would have to, of course. But how?
Exasperated and out of time, Jaspers finally grabbed his wife’s key chain, removed the spare key to the Volvo, scooped up his bags, and raced out the front door. If he was lucky, he could make it to LAX in less than an hour. God forbid there be any accidents or road repairs. He had no margin for error.
Covered with perspiration, Jaspers threw his things in the trunk, hopped into the front seat, and pulled his door shut, hoping not to wake Leigh Ann or the neighbors with his racket. Then he flipped on the headlights and jammed the key in the ignition. The Volvo sputtered for a moment, as if its engine was flooded.
That was strange, thought Jaspers. He tried it again.
The force of the explosion could be heard for miles.
7
MONDAY, JANUARY 12 – 3:38 p.m. – BABYLON, IRAQ
The sleek black-and-gold helicopter gently banked to the east.
It descended to three thousand feet, and the pilots began their direct approach into Babylon. Stretched before them was a skyline of construction cranes and high-rise apartments and office buildings in various stages of completion.
To the east, on the shores of the Euphrates River, was the dazzling new Hilton, alongside the Marriott Grand, the Four Seasons, and the sprawling new regional headquarters for ExxonMobil, just weeks away from its grand opening. To the west were the Central Palace, the famed Ishtar Gate, and the newly expanded Royal Museum of Archeology, side by side with the nearly completed corporate headquarters for at least a dozen major American and European banks and oil companies. And dead ahead was their destination, the Great Tower of the People, the gleaming glass-and-steel parliament and executive administration building, rising seventy stories above the new Iraqi capital.
At a cruising speed of over 140 kilometers an hour, the pilots had no doubt they would reach the rooftop landing pad a good sixteen minutes ahead of schedule. But their hearts were still pounding. For this was no usual test drive, and theirs was no typical passenger. Seated in one of the plush leather seats in the back of the cabin was Mustafa Al-Hassani.
The seventy-five-year-old Iraqi president had said nothing to the pilots on the six-hour round-trip to Samarra and Karbala and back. Most of the flight he had spent talking on a satellite phone or with his chief political aide, Khalid Tariq. The men flying the helicopter were somewhat in awe, being in the presence of one of the few Arab leaders who had a
ctually survived the firestorm, and they were dying to ask how had he done it. What did Al-Hassani know that the others didn’t? Was he a god, as the buzz on the Arab street now claimed?
He certainly looked like a holy man, with intense dark eyes, a long and weathered face, a salt-and-pepper beard, and white flowing robes, and few seemed to doubt he had a spark of the divine.
Widely considered the intellectual grandfather of Iraq’s profreedom movement, he had once been a beloved professor of Arabic literature and poetry by day and one of the country’s shrewdest political strategists and revolutionary organizers by night. He had conceived a vision of what Iraq could be without Saddam back when few thought it was possible, and he had vowed not to rest until he helped bring it to pass. It had gotten him arrested and imprisoned by the Ba’ath Party, and he had been tortured without mercy. But now here he was, sitting behind them, a man who seemingly could not die.
The Iraqi-born but American-trained chopper pilots desperately wanted to talk with this rising icon. They wanted to hear his stories and ask him questions—not just about how he was enjoying his ride, but about his plans for the future. But they knew it was a line they could not cross. Their job was to fly, not to speak, and they could not afford to be fired. So they simply chose to be content with being in Al-Hassani’s presence.
What was particularly intriguing to them was the fact that political, business, and tribal leaders from all over the region were suddenly converging upon Babylon for a series of apparently top-secret meetings.
The pilots themselves had been required to sign nondisclosure forms covering all of their time with the Iraqi president. Moreover, they had heard no specific names mentioned over their radios, but it was clear from the chatter of the air-traffic controllers that these leaders were coming from as far away as Algeria to the west and Kyrgyzstan to the east. They had even overheard a flight originating from Isfahan, Iran, being cleared into Iraqi airspace less than an hour ago. But why? What could possibly bring them all to Babylon amid all the horror going on in their own countries?