It was surreal, and unsettling, though he couldn't precisely put his finger on why. It felt at once ominous and inevitable. Babylon was back in the news after three hundred centuries buried under the desert sands. Men were trying to blow up the Temple Mount and rebuild a temple laid waste nearly twenty centuries before. Philistines and Israelites were at war again, forty centuries after David and Goliath.
Why? What was happening? What did it mean? Bennett didn't know. All he knew for certain was that something was taking him where he did not mean to go. He was being drawn, against his will, into the epicenter of the world's darkest, cruelest conflict. Men and women were dying all around him. The destruction he'd seen just in the last few days were beyond his deepest fears.
But it seemed there was nothing he could do to resist or slow his journey. Unseen forces were forcing him further and further away from the safe and familiar. He was being driven out into dark waters, out into the shadow lands. No longer was he in control of his own destiny. He wondered if he ever had been. He was suddenly a branch being swept along by a raging river, a river that carried prophets and priests and poets before him, a river whose increasingly swift currents now threatened to consume him without mercy, without warning.
THIRTY-SIX
No other part of the world cast the same spell.
The more Bennett stared at the headlines on his computer, and the more he thought about the past few weeks, the more it seemed the world was hypnotized by the Middle East — obsessed with its oil, intoxicated by its mysteries, seduced by its tales of the supernatural. And so was he.
Even at the peak of the bipolar world — the East-West cold war clash between free people and the Evil Empire — the Middle East was the main event. The central battleground. The '48 war. The Suez Crisis of '56. The Six Day War of '67. The war of attrition. The Yom Kippur War of '73. The Arab oil embargo. The explosion of OPEC and petrodollars. The civil war in Lebanon in '75. The Israeli invasion of '82. The atheists armed the Mus-lims. The Christians armed the Jews. Thousands died. Millions more were maimed and orphaned. There were other skirmishes, other hot zones. But again and again the world's attention was drawn back to the Middle East, as it was being drawn again. Why?
McCoy didn't think the term Middle East quite fit. Nor did Near East Asia. Nor did the Arab world. Not precisely. She called it NAMESTAN— North Africa, the Middle East, and the Stans (Afghanuftzn, Pakistan, and the Muslim former Soviet Central Asian republics such as Kazakhstan, Uzbeki-stan, Tajikistan and the others). But by any name it smelled just as foul.
Without question, the region comprised the most fought-over real estate in the history of mankind. And it wasn't just over oil. That might partially explain recent times, but not the long arc of history. The Romans hadn't conquered the region for oil. Nor had the Ottomans. The Assyrians, Baby-lonians, Egyptians, and Persians slaughtered each other for control of NAMESTAN for thousands of years before anyone knew of the black gold buried under its sands.
Why then did all roads lead to it, and to the jewel at its navel, the city of Jerusalem, the City of Peace? What were the mystical sirens that drew the kings and conquerors of history? Why were a few hundred reporters assigned to Beijing, but more than two thousand to Jerusalem? What was the narcotic that transformed rational men in this part of the world into bloodthirsty killers, willing to annihilate women and children and entire towns and villages to possess it? What was drawing him?
It was a question he couldn't shake. Bennett hadn't sought this journey. But something or someone was forcing him to proceed. Regardless of what he did, it refused to let go. And it scared him. It wasn't simply his fear of death that now kept him awake at nights. It was the certain knowledge that his fate was not his own.
Bennett logged into his AOL account to check his personal e-mails. He'd lost his Blackberry PDA somewhere between Jerusalem and Germany and there hadn't exactly been any spare time to buy a new one. He guessed the White House communications office would probably issue him one. But that, too, took time he didn't have.
"You 've got mail."
Too much, as it turned out. He scrolled through a 138 messages. A handful were from former colleagues at GSX worried about him and his mom. Most of the rest were spam — ads for weight loss programs, hair transplant treatments, laser eye surgery, special offers for Viagra, Russian mail-order brides. It was ridiculous, and infuriating. No wonder AOL was in trouble. He deleted everything in sight, except two new messages that caught his eye.
The first was from Mordechai. He'd be arriving at the "Mount of Olives" on Sunday, just after noon. It was about time, Bennett thought. The good doctor was absolutely, positively supposed to have been there overnight. Now he was going to be a full four days late. Bennett read further. First came an apology, followed by an explanation. It was cryptic, to say the least. But reading between the lines, and knowing the old man as he did, he basically figured out what was going on. Storms had grounded all flights out of Ben Gurion for nearly forty-eight hours. The FedEx jet he was using for cover had apparently then taken him to Istanbul, then to Rome, then on to London. It was the best he could do without taking the risk of flying on standard commercial aviation.
Every intelligence service in the world, after all, knew who Dr. Eliezer Mordechai was. They knew he'd been the director of the Mossad's Arab Desk from '76 to '84. The director of the Mossad's Nuclear Desk from '85 to '87. Full director of the Mossad from 1988 to 1996. They knew he'd helped plan the rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. They assumed he'd helped plan the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981. And they suspected he'd personally ordered the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir, the PLO terror master, in Tunis on April 16, 1988.
Thus, even if he used a false passport, facial recognition software recently installed at every major airport in Europe was sure to pick him up and identify him. He'd be tagged. He'd be followed. And he'd lead them to Doron and Sa'id. It was a risk none of them could afford taking. So McCoy had suggested flying him on a series of FedEx planes. It was a technique the CIA used from time to time to move NOCs — nonofficial cover operatives— around the globe with the least chance of them getting picked up by Interpol or foreign spooks. Jack Mitchell loved the idea, as did Mordechai.
It was the last line of the e-mail that intrigued Bennett the most. "Looking forward to seeing you. I bear gifts from afar." He read it again, then a third time. "Gifts from afar'7. What in the world was that supposed to mean? Bennett had had enough surprises for one lifetime. He didn't need any more. He hit the reply button, typed three lines—"Skip the gifts. I just have one question. Did you follow the money?" — then hit send.
The second e-mail was from Marcus Jackson at The New York Times. The guy was relentless. He refused to give up. He said he felt bad about Bennett's mom and hoped the FBI found her safe and sound. But he was hunting Bennett down. He was determined to do another story, the inside story of the firefight in Gaza. He knew some of the details already, and his information was eerily precise. Jackson knew what absolutely no one else had reported yet — the code name, Operation Briar Patch. He knew Bennett was no longer in Palestine. He knew McCoy was with him, and he suspected Sa'id and Galishnikov were, too.