His BlackBerry began to vibrate. He glanced at the screen. It was his mother. He gritted his teeth. She had the most incredible timing.
“Hey, Mom, now is not the best time,” he said, cupping his hand over his mouth to keep as quiet as possible.
“Why are you whispering? Is everything all right?” asked Ruth Bennett from her town house in Orlando.
“I’m actually in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?”
“Will you?”
“Of course I will.”
“You promise?”
“Of course I promise,” he sighed. “Every Saturday morning, 9 a.m. — have I missed one yet?”
“You’re a good boy. I’m so, so sorry about Dr. Mordechai. Are you going to the funeral?”
“There’s not going to be a funeral, Mom.”
“What are you talking about? There has to be a funeral. He was a great man.”
“They don’t think of him that way here. But look, I really need to go. I’ll call you tonight.”
“You know, I think I’ve settled on a church,” his mother continued, oblivious to the urgency in his voice. “It’s a big one, about fifteen minutes from me. The pastor is wonderful. You and Erin really need to come down and hear him. He’s doing a series on the End Times right now. Fas-cinating. Absolutely fascinating. He actually quoted Dr. Mordechai last week. I just about fell out of my chair. I wanted to stand up and shout, ‘I know that guy. I know him!’”
Bennett had to bite his tongue. He loved his mother dearly. The last thing he wanted was to communicate any disrespect. But sometimes…
“Anyway, the pastor said Dr. Mordechai had an intriguing theory. Since nobody knows when Jesus is going to return — Jesus said even He didn’t know; He said only His Father knew — that would mean that Satan doesn’t know either. Which means Satan has always had to be prepared for any eventuality. That means that for almost two thousand years, he’s had to have at least one Antichrist on the earth, in position, ready to go, in every generation since the Resurrection. Which is why there have been so many evil dictators throughout history. So there has to be someone out there, right now, walking around the planet at this very minute. Waiting. Preparing. Plotting. It could be somebody you know. It could be someone I know. It’s scary, don’t you think?”
Bennett took a deep breath. That was enough for now. He again told his mother how much he loved her and promised to call her the moment he had the chance. Then he went looking for Erin, whom he found in Mordechai’s private study.
32
The room had been stripped bare.
All the books of every shelf were gone. So were the papers and the file cabinets. A PC still sat on the old man’s desk, but its hard drive had been ripped out. Even his favorite swivel chair was gone.
“You think Mossad took it all?” Bennett asked, putting his arm around Erin.
“I guess,” said Erin, still trying to make sense of it.
“What do you think they were looking for?”
“Same thing we are,” Erin replied. “Any scrap that could point in the right direction.”
Bennett noticed something under the desk. He bent down to see what it was only to find a shattered picture frame. He carefully picked through the shards of glass and pulled out a small black-and-white photograph. It was Mordechai and his wife, Yael, on their wedding day at a synagogue in west Jerusalem.
He dusted it off and handed it to Erin, angered by what he was seeing. A murder investigation was one thing; the wholesale removal of a man’s most personal possessions from his own home was another thing entirely.
“Didn’t Dr. Barak tell us that Mordechai had come to him with new information about the Copper Scroll sometime shortly after the firestorm?” Bennett suddenly asked.
“Yes,” Erin replied.
“And isn’t that new information what prompted Mordechai to go to Doron and urge him to put together the whole group with Murray and Jaspers?”
Erin nodded.
“And he said that Murray had been meeting with a literary agent the day he died.”
“I don’t remember that,” said Erin.
“You don’t?”
“No,” she said. “Is that what you and Dr. Barak were talking about when we got back from Amman?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was talking to Natasha, remember? I didn’t hear what you guys were saying.”
Bennett strained to recall the details of the conversation. “Barak said something about how Jaspers had called him and told him Murray was shopping a book proposal around New York, something about the Copper Scroll. Barak was furious with Murray and called him up and said he was jeopardizing everything. Murray told him they had nothing to worry about.”
“Okay, so… ?”
“So what was Mordechai’s lead? What did he have? Where did he get it from, and where is it now?”
“I don’t know,” said Erin. “Nobody knows. Natasha said she didn’t even know. Her grandfather never told her.”
“But someone thought the answer lay in this room,” said Bennett.
“Which is why they took everything,” Erin agreed. “The big question is, would they know what they were looking for?”
“I’ve got a bigger question than that,” said Bennett.
“What’s that?”
“Shouldn’t there be a backup of all the files that were on Mordechai’s PC?”
They both thought about that for a moment.
“The war room,” said Erin.
They bolted for Mordechai’s closet, pushed through the racks of clothes, and found the hidden elevator that had once saved their lives when Saddam Hussein had ordered Operation Last Jihad. Erin entered the passcode from memory, and thirty seconds later they were in the subterranean chamber that once had been used as a clandestine Mossad operations center. It was here that Erin and Mordechai had worked so feverishly to keep Bennett alive after that ferocious gun battle with Iraqi terrorists, and it was here that they had watched the U.S. launch its massive attack on Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard. But this, too, was now all cleaned out.
Gone were all the video monitors and the computers, once cross-linked to the Mossad and CIA mainframes. Gone were the mini-medical center and the weapons-storage closet and the data-storage system that had helped Mordechai track the latest world developments and do all the analysis for which he’d become so famous. It had all been ripped out. The room was now just a ghost of what it had been, filled with nothing more than frayed wiring and bittersweet memories. They had hit a dead end.
As frustrated as they were exhausted, they made their way back to the elevator and headed up. Erin checked her watch. They had only a few minutes before the neighborhood security patrol would finish its rounds and come back to check Mordechai’s house.
“What now?” Bennett asked as the door slid open and they stepped back into Mordechai’s closet.
But Erin didn’t answer. She stuck out her arm to block him from moving forward, then pulled out her Beretta.
Down the hallway, someone was whispering.
Erin carefully slid off her shoes, moved to the door, and motioned for him to stay put for a moment. Bennett’s pulse was racing. His palms were sweaty. Who was out there, and why? It couldn’t be the security patrol. There would be no reason for them to whisper. But why else would anybody be in the house? Unless they were hunting the same clue — or hunting for them.
Bennett had no weapon. He did, however, have access to the best intel money could buy. He quickly put his BlackBerry on silence mode, then used the tracking wheel to find the live CIA satellite downlink that had helped them get here in the first place. He double-clicked and waited for the connection to kick in. It never did. He got an error message instead: Server connection lost. That was strange, Bennett thought. It had worked just moments earlier. Now, when they needed it most, it went down?