“ God, don’t I wish.”
“ What he stole from us is crucial. I want you to make sure we get it back alive.”
“ Alive?”
“ It’s a baby.”
“ A… What’s a baby doing in there?”
“ That’s not your concern, Ted. Just talk about the baby when you see it. Tell me where it is. When we go inside, I want to make sure it isn’t injured.”
“ But what about my family?”
“ I told you, just get them onto the floor. I promise, you and your wife and your son will be safe. An hour from now, this’ll be over. We’ll be gone. Your family will owe their lives to you. You’ll be a hero to them. Your wife won’t have any choice except to forgive you for hitting her. Do you understand, Ted? Is everything clear?”
Kagan stood with Andrei, Mikhail, Yakov, and the new man, Viktor, in the corridor outside the three doors. Beyond the middle door, he heard the muffled sound of a television, the only noise in the corridor. All the other guests were probably away from their rooms, enjoying the holiday festivities.
As adrenaline surged through him, Kagan heard just enough of the television program to be able to determine that a little girl was asking someone if he was really Santa Claus. The voice of an elderly man said that he was.
That middle room was where the three bodyguards were based.
Concentrating to control his breathing, Kagan watched Andrei take his cell phone from his pocket. It was set to the vibrate mode, and what Andrei waited for was a call from the nursemaid in the suite. Not that Andrei would answer the call. All he needed was to feel the vibration through his glove.
He also needed to verify the caller’s number. It would signal that the nursemaid had rigged the door to the left, pressing a strip of plastic against the spring-controlled latch, preventing it from sliding into the door frame and locking the door. She had done the same with the door on the right.
By now, she would have taken the baby into the bathroom, where the two of them would be lying in the bathtub.
The bathtub wasn’t sturdy enough to keep bullets from penetrating it, but shots weren’t likely to go in that direction. As a precaution, however, Hassan’s rivals had bribed the nursemaid to lie sideways, with her back to the closed bathroom door, holding the baby on the other side so that if a chance bullet did come into the bathroom, the baby would have a human shield.
Andrei’s phone made a faint buzzing sound. He looked at the screen to view the caller’s number. He nodded to the team, put the phone away, and drew the Glock from his coat pocket.
Kagan and the others pulled out their weapons. A sound suppressor projected from each barrel.
Each man eased back the slide on his pistol just enough to assure that a round was in the firing chamber. They’d performed this precaution several times prior to starting the mission, but no matter how often they’d already done so, they felt compelled to do it yet again, an obsessive habit of gunfighters.
Kagan’s hands were sweaty in his latex gloves.
Andrei nodded a final time. The team separated, Kagan and Mikhail going to the door on the right, beyond which, they’d been told, the nursemaid rested when Hassan’s wife took care of the baby. Yakov and Viktor proceeded to the door on the far left, while Andrei-who liked frontal distractions-went to the middle door.
Andrei knocked loudly on the middle door, no doubt startling the bodyguards beyond it. Kagan pressed a hand against the door on the right at the exact moment Yakov did the same to the door on the far left.
For an urgent second, Kagan met resistance and wondered if the nursemaid’s strip of plastic had in fact kept the latch from engaging, but then Andrei knocked louder on the middle door, and when Kagan pushed, his door came open. Mikhail immediately aimed past him, making sure the room was unoccupied.
Andrei pounded on the middle door a third time, saying, “Housekeeping!” in a loud voice while Kagan and Mikhail hurried into the room on the right. As the nursemaid had promised, the connecting door was open. Kagan pretended that the bed was in his way, allowing Mikhail to charge ahead and crouch, firing upward toward chest and head level in the middle room.
Mikhail’s sound suppressor made the shots barely audible. Amid the smell of burned gunpowder, Kagan hurried next to him and fired upward, his bullets striking bodyguards who were in effect already dead. In the opposite open doorway, Yakov and Viktor crouched and also fired upward, the angle of their aim preventing them from being caught in a crossfire.
Blood spurted from the three bodyguards. Groaning, they fell in a cluster, one of them landing on the other two.
Mikhail stepped into the room and shot each man in the head.
Kagan ran back through the bedroom toward the door he’d shoved open. He leaned into the corridor and motioned for Andrei to enter. The moment Andrei hurried past him, Kagan tore off the plastic strip attached to the side of the door, allowing the latch to function again. He shut the door and turned the dead bolt, then followed Andrei into the middle room, where the coppery smell of blood was now strong.
They stepped over the bodies and joined the rest of the team in the third bedroom, the outer door to which Yakov had closed and locked.
Andrei knocked three times on the bathroom door, twice, then once, completing the all-clear signal.
After a pause, the door was unlocked. As it came open, Kagan saw a Palestinian woman. Her veil made it difficult to tell how old she was or what she looked like, but she had dark, expressive eyes that communicated her nervousness. She wore a black head scarf and a modest, loose black dress.
She held an Arab baby in her arms. The child wore a blue sleeper and was wrapped in a blanket.
Frightened, the woman looked past Andrei and his men toward the middle room.
“ It’s finished,” Andrei said.
She knew enough English to understand.
Andrei held out a thick envelope. “Here’s the remainder of what you’re owed. Give us the baby.”
The woman frowned at the envelope, as if wishing that she’d never agreed to be part of this.
“ Take the money,” Andrei said. “You earned it. Go far away.”
The woman hesitated.
“ Viktor,” Andrei said, “get the baby from her.”
Viktor did what he was told. The infant sensed the less comforting grip and squirmed.
The woman looked troubled.
“ Don’t worry. He’ll be fine,” Andrei assured her.
As she took the envelope, Yakov shot her twice in the chest and once in the head. She toppled back, landing on the white tiles of the bathroom floor. Yakov stepped over her blood and yanked the envelope from her hand.
“ The next part of the story isn’t in Matthew’s gospel,” Kagan said. “It’s in Luke’s, where we’re told that the Roman emperor issued a census decree.”
He swallowed coffee. Needing the energy it provided, he felt his dry mouth absorb the hot liquid. His right hand remained on the pistol in his lap.
“ The census was important for a lot of reasons. It established a population base on which Rome could demand taxes from Israel. But it also forced the Jews to travel, sometimes far, and thus reminded them that they were at the emperor’s beck and call.”
“ Why were they forced to travel?” Cole asked.
“ Because each family had to register according to the tribe-what they called the house-that the husband belonged to. To do that, they needed to go to whatever town was originally associated with that tribe. This is where Mary and Joseph get involved. They lived to the north in Nazareth, but Joseph belonged to the house of David, and the town associated with David was Bethlehem, seventy-five miles to the south. It was a difficult journey over several deep canyons. To complicate matters, Mary was far along in her pregnancy, which meant that they needed to be careful, taking even longer than usual to get there. As a consequence, when they finally reached Bethlehem, a lot of people had arrived sooner, and there weren’t any places for them to stay. No room at the inn, as Luke’s gospel says.”