The Day of Atonement Read online

  The Day of Atonement

  Also by Breck England

  The Tarleton Murders: Sherlock Holmes in America

  The Day of Atonement

  A Novel of the End

  Breck England

  Mango Publishing

  Coral Gables

  Copyright © 2018 Breck England

  Cover & Layout Design: Jermaine Lau

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  The Day of Atonement: Volume I

  Library of Congress Cataloging

  ISBN: (print) 978-1-63353-796-5 (ebook) 978-1-63353-797-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952272

  BISAC category code: “FIC031060—FICTION / Thrillers / Political”

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  January 27, 1984

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, October 2, 2027

  Chapter 2

  Sunday, October 3, 2027

  Chapter 3

  Monday, October 4, 2027

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday, October 5, 2027

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday, October 6, 2027

  Breck England

  Preface

  The Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem is the keystone in the arch of faith for three great world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here, they say, the Creation began. Here Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son. Here Solomon’s temple stood. Here Christ was crucified.

  On the summit of the Mount stands the golden Dome of the Rock, where the hopes of half of humanity converge. Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold similar beliefs that a Messiah will one day descend to this spot and rule the earth from this place, bringing a new order of peace and justice. On that day every human soul will be gathered into one true faith—thus, it will be a day of At-One-Ment.

  But for now this “keystone in the arch of faith” trembles. The Temple Mount stands at the apex of the world’s conflict zones. Many Jews want to take down the dome and build a new temple there. Radical Christians want to help because they believe it will hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Islamic world would not stand still if anyone touches the holy shrine.

  The religious and geopolitical forces pressing on this one small hill in Jerusalem threaten to collapse our world. If the keystone falls, the outcome might make all world wars look petty by comparison. And some people in the shadows, using technological tools that are already in our grasp, are actively working to bring that day about.

  This is about what might happen if their plans succeed—on the Day of Atonement.

  Prologue

  January 27, 1984

  The Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 0630h

  The guard peered through the diminishing darkness at the threads he held in his fingers. He could just tell a black thread from a white thread.

  It was time for the dawn prayer.

  “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful.”

  He crouched on a stone bench next to the water tap and felt for the valve. Cold water streamed from the old stone fountain. He washed his right hand, then his left, and rinsed his mouth. Gently, he cupped his hand and inhaled water from his hand and breathed it out again.

  He thought he heard a whisper behind him, turned to look, but there was nothing.

  A little more quietly, he washed his arms three times and then swept both of his dripping hands through his hair.

  All at once he jerked up his head. He closed the valve abruptly and listened hard.

  The sound of dripping water stopped.

  Then another sound, a rustling rapid and intense, broke the profound peace of the morning. The guard knew instinctively what it meant.

  Making no noise, he leaped from the bench and ran up the flagstones toward the Dome of the Rock. Sprinting into the shadow of a cypress tree, he averted his eyes from the floodlit golden shrine that would have blinded him and into the darkness beyond it.

  Sunrise was an hour away, but the clouds glowed gray from a high crescent moon. Against the pale stone walls he could see figures moving like locusts—three, maybe four of them, strangely bent and misshapen as they scuttled from the eastern gate toward the dome.

  The guard froze for an instant, then grasped for the radiophone at his belt. He would not call the other guards; there was no time. He needed someone much faster and much stronger. In a hush he spoke the code into the phone.

  The intruders had reached the dome and were crawling around it. His uncle had been right to alert him; the danger was here. Now. Helpless fear came over him—what should he do?

  It seemed forever, but it was really only minutes before the military police exploded silently into the Temple Mount. The young guard was amazed at their speed and organization. Running towards them he pointed the way to the intruders, who had dropped heavy backpacks and were now retreating toward the eastern wall. The police caught and wrestled two of the figures, who seemed older and slower. Another stayed momentarily ahead of them, but a fourth, scampering like an athlete, dived over the wall and disappeared.

  The guard flicked on his torch and gazed at the three men the police had caught; their faces meant nothing to him. He exchanged a few questions and answers with the police, who were polite but now had little use for him—they were busily examining the foundations of the dome.

  He understood why. Parcels and ropes lay scattered across the pavement of the Temple Mount. He moved one of the packages with his toe and was ordered back. A quick glance by the aid of his torch told him what he already knew—dynamite. A large rucksack filled with it. A little pride warmed him; he was so new, so young, and he had stopped an attack on the dome. His uncle, who had got him this job, would be pleased.

  By now the other guards on duty had stirred from their quarters and were watching the plaza warily, uncomfortably respectful of the Israelis’ efficiency. As the gray light grew, they stood back and smoked. A couple of them congratulated him, and he grinned and accepted a Turkish cigarette.

  Three Israeli uniforms walked toward him; to his surprise, one of them was a young woman whose face looked as if it had been battered with stones. On her shoulder she wore a white patch encircled with blue lettering.

  “Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations,” he read.

  The woman nodded once, not happily. She asked to see his identification card and studied it as she pulled out a cigarette of her own.

  “Did you see the one who escaped?” she asked in easy Arabic. “Would you recognize him again?”

  “I might. I already told that to the men.”

  She was unruffled, her bony, plated face showi
ng no emotion. “Then you could help us find him.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I want to show you something.” She marched away without another word.

  “After prayer,” he called. She turned and looked at him disdainfully, but he smiled and went into Al-Aqsa for his morning devotional. Because of the turmoil outside, the mosque was empty; only a little light came from the high windows and the lamp over the pulpit. He dropped to the carpet, faced the qibla, and performed the dawn prayer. “Do not defend the mosque,” his uncle had told him, “only to ignore what it is for.”

  The woman was still waiting for him when he went out.

  Wordlessly, they traveled in a secure van—the guard, the woman, and two Israeli soldiers—to West Jerusalem far away from his neighborhood, then over a rough road into a deserted Palestinian village called Lifta. Fragments of stone walls littered the hillside among bushes caught in the cliffside like balls of gray wool. There were many villages like this one, emptied by despair, medieval relics shaken down by the thundering of the new autoroute nearby.

  They stopped at a house, a qubba with a little plaster dome, near a dead tree and a spring abandoned to rubbish and choked with ancient leaves. It was surrounded by armored vehicles and soldiers standing watch.

  “Shu hada?” the guard asked. “What is this?”

  “This is their headquarters.” It seemed a grandiose word for such a place. “We’ve been watching it for some time.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I hoped you could tell us,” the woman replied.

  Inside the house technicians were taking up stones from the floor, and under a small floodlight the guard caught sight of a stack of rifles and other ordnance jammed into a shallow cellar.

  “There are weapons enough down there for a small army,” the woman said. “But this is what interests me.” Her finger made a circle around the room.

  The guard saw that the plaster walls were painted with pictures that made no sense—trees, angels, swords, bleeding animals, and on the west wall a crude human figure holding up a knife in one hand and in the other a lamb with wide cartoon-like eyes. A lion crept from the ceiling toward the lamb. On all the walls old newspaper articles and photos hung from yellowing tape among Stars of David, crosses, and crescent moons, a mad mixture of religious symbols spinning around as if sucked up and deposited by a flood.

  On the western wall, under the lion’s mouth, a motto was chalked in white Hebrew letters. He read it easily to himself.

  Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire. He shall purify the sons of Levi, he shall purge them as silver and gold, and they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness.

  “What do you make of this?” the woman asked.

  Baffled, the guard gazed slowly around the room and shook his head. “Ma’allish. God knows.”

  “Look closer.” She left him abruptly, stepping outside to talk on her radiophone.

  Curious, the guard studied the walls under the eyes of the two soldiers.

  A huge crucifix, splayed at the ends of the crossbars and splashed with red, dominated the northern wall; the photo of a young man in uniform was pinned at the nexus of the cross. At the top of the wall stretched a painting of a dark, robed figure like the shadow of an angel.

  On the east wall above the door, two priestly figures wrestled a wounded bull streaming blood. Perhaps a hundred golden Stars of David dripped like painted rain from the roof. Photographs decorated the wall, one of them framed. The man in the photo looked familiar with his short, curt beard and smile—by the caption, the Zionist hero Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders of the State of Israel. This east wall, the guard realized, was Jewish, while the north wall was Christian.

  That would mean the south wall, the wall facing Mecca, was for Islam. It was covered with images. Painted trees dropped fruit into the mouths of stick-figure souls under a crescent moon. Coarsely photocopied pictures hung from a tree. A rough mural of the Great Mosque at Mecca stretched from one side of the wall to the other, concentric circles of pilgrims in white paint ringing the Kaaba. Above it all, a black eagle spread its wings over the ceiling.

  The four images—the lion, the angel, the bull, and the eagle—converged overhead in a cupola streaked with red and yellow paint flowing from a central star, a parody of the Dome of the Rock.

  “What do you make of this?” the Israeli Security woman had returned and was standing at his elbow.

  “Syncretism,” he said.

  The woman gave a gravelly laugh. “A big word for your mouth.”

  He bristled; should he tell her about his years at university in Cairo, about his first-class honors degree in languages and literature? Remembering his uncle, he chose not to be offended.

  But he broke into cultivated English to explain. “Syncretism. A melding or mixing of many religions into one. Perhaps this is a shrine of some sort.”

  And she answered him in English. “Yes, I see all of that. But what about the photos?” She pointed impatiently at two curling images dangling from the southern wall. Then softly: “Why the photos?”

  The guard looked closer at them and then leaped back as if someone had struck him.

  “This one is a picture of my uncle. Doctor Haytham al-Ayoub.”

  “So it is,” the woman said, watching him, the toughness returning to her voice. “And the other?”

  The guard was speechless. The other photo, rumpled by the humid air, hanging at an irrational angle from a claw of the eagle, was of himself.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, October 2, 2027

  The man stood erect, all in black, waiting in the autumn cold for the Pope to appear. On one side of the great square the twin towers of the cathedral and the ancient palace of St. John Lateran rose out of the morning darkness. On another side stood the rose-colored Renaissance face of the sanctuary of the Holy Stairs. Between them in the center of the square the Egyptian obelisk soared into the frozen sky; from the base of the obelisk a great stone eagle soared upwards and a granite lion lapped hungrily at a frozen cascade of fruit and flowers.

  He worked over and over in his mind the geometry of the next hour, thinking mechanically through his preparations—weapon, route, timing. What could reasonably be expected…what unexpected.

  He concentrated on a sharp diagonal line between sun and shadow descending the façade of the sanctuary. Reflexively he stroked with his thumb the unfamiliar gold ring on his fourth finger, then re-focused his mind on the number of stairs, the sequence of the ritual, the cubical room inside.

  The crowd grew larger, and as a cold wind raced over the square people around him jostled and stamped their feet to warm themselves. He remained still and kept his eyes on nothing. The voices of the crowd were like the wind on his neck—prickly, scraping. Otherwise, the people seemed infinitely remote. He felt utterly and triumphantly alone. He knew there was no one like himself in all the world, no one with the singular mission he had to perform, no one with the peculiar knowledge he had.

  No one, of course, but his holy father, who had willed him here.

  Inadvertently, the man looked up the lines of the obelisk to the icy, unwavering blue sky, then back to the chapel steps. His concentration ebbed only slightly; his mouth tightened. What he had done so far had been hard…very hard. What he had yet to do would be far harder, but just as necessary. For that, he would need ice and stone within himself.

  He lowered his gaze to the ground. His dark face looked back at him from the twin black mirrors of his shoes. He sighed, then with a strong effort he silenced his breathing, concentrated his hearing, immobilized himself.

  There was a cheer from the crowd. The time had come.

  Today he would carry out his mission. Today the long preparation would end, the years of training, the decades of planning, the centuries of confused hope—it would all make
sense soon. Today the genetic swirl that had given rise to himself would meet its apex. Today would be not just another gust in the deceptively chaotic storm of time—it would be the eye of time. The event toward which all history had flowed in a breathless rush.

  Piazza San Giovanni, Rome, 0930h

  “The crowds this Pope draws,” thought Antonio Bevo as he surveyed them intently. From his perch near the corner of the square he could see everything; and to him everything looked very odd.

  The piazza of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome, sloped away from him like steps in a fountain. The cobbled stairs were usually dotted with the sellers of tourist trinkets, but today most of them had been crowded off the square. He had dealt with crowds for years, but mobs like this one were new to him.

  Bevo was head of the detail of Roman police designated to guard the Pope when he ventured out of the Vatican and into the city of which he was nominally bishop. Bevo’s job was to coordinate with the Vatican authorities and secure the sites the Pope would visit. Only yesterday he had been the featured speaker at the Papal Visitation Security conference, and had, he thought, impressed the audience. He was under no illusion that his flat black suit and sunglasses made him inconspicuous; in his work he wanted to be conspicuous, to be seen as authoritative and even fearsome. He had efficiently guarded popes since the days of John Paul II. The Vatican police had made occasional attempts to recruit him, but he had no desire to immure himself there.

  Nevertheless, he did not know what kind of security he could ensure in this situation. A hugely muscled cowboy walked past him with spurs tinkling, a great gold cross hanging around his neck. Three men dressed in identical rainbow-colored sweat suits giggled as they followed the cowboy around the square. Gypsies squatted on the pavement, showing their scars to passersby and begging for euros; Arabs tried hawking souvenirs in the crush. Scattered throughout were groups of protesters with banners pleading for a return to old ways; the protesters, a tight-faced lot of men in old black suits, were ignored except for a couple of Bevo’s men who kept close watch on them.