Brink of Chaos Read online

  The commanding Shin Bet agent, who was surveying the scene from his position on the edge of the large open plaza, radioed the Jerusalem police and gave his order in Hebrew. “We need armed officers to disperse an illegal assembly at the Western Wall plaza, over.”

  “This is police dispatch. What is your situation?”

  “A Christian religious leader is preaching in violation of the prime minister’s emergency order regarding religious incitement of civil unrest.”

  “Confirmed. Officers are being dispatched, over.”

  Beyond the outer ring of listeners, GNN reporter Bart Kingston was ready to do a stand-up with his single cameraman. When he had heard from his sources in the city that Pastor Campbell planned to defy the prime minister’s emergency orders to prohibit “public displays of extremist religious language,” he rushed to the scene.

  His timing was perfect. At the other end of the plaza, a dozen Jerusalem police were entering the wide space, heading directly toward the crowd. A loudspeaker boomed over the area, commanding the crowd to disperse. People moved in all directions. Soon, the only people left were Campbell, a handful of his devotees, and the police.

  Kingston motioned for his camera guy to follow him closer to the Western Wall area. Then the unexpected happened — four Jewish men, who appeared to be lawyers or some kind of businessmen, appeared and rushed headlong toward the police.

  They held papers in their hands, shouting, “We have a temporary restraining order from the Israeli Supreme Court to protect the rights of these Christian worshipers …”

  Kingston, standing a good distance away, watched as the guards disregarded the paperwork. One of the officers lobbed a canister of tear gas into the air, which fell a few feet away from Campbell, spilling white smoke into the area. A young woman collapsed, coughing and gagging. Campbell stumbled over to her and picked her up in his arms and tried to walk her away from the area. But his eyes were streaming with tears, and his throat was closing as if a boa constrictor was squeezing his windpipe.

  From his safe position, Kingston was about to ask his cameraman if he had caught all of this, but the guy was a pro, and Kingston knew it. At some point — perhaps only an instant later — it ceased to be a news story for Bart Kingston.

  He surveyed the scene. Pastor Peter Campbell was overcome by gas and down on his knees with a young woman cradled in his arms. Kingston looked up at the Temple Mount, where the construction workers were peering down at the melee on the plaza below.

  Apocalypse was one of the words that flooded Kingston’s mind.

  And he thought of another word, one that Campbell had shared in their television interview a week before. It was a word that he couldn’t admit to anyone else. He barely was able to admit it to himself, but he was seriously entertaining it and what it meant. The thought of the ultimate divorce — of some taken and some left. A God who rescues those who have accepted his lifeline and leaving behind those who have refused. As the police with their gas masks waded into the smoke to arrest Campbell’s small but disabled group, Kingston could not shake the almost palpable force of that word.

  Rapture.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Washington, D.C.

  It was after hours and Supreme Court Justice Carter Lapham was in the back of the limo that was pulling out of the underground parking deck of the Supreme Court building. For some reason his driver turned onto the avenue that ran past the front of the tall marble courthouse with the words “Equal Justice Under Law” chiseled in stone over the columns. After stopping at the corner, the driver turned right onto Second Street and slowly eased into traffic as it passed the Supreme Court building. It looked like a traffic tie-up ahead and some flashing lights from two squad cars.

  Lapham peered at the tangle of traffic. “Hey, Brock,” he said with a wry smile, “would you like me to drive tonight? I could teach you some techniques on avoiding traffic jams.”

  Brock, his longtime driver, smiled into the rear view mirror but didn’t respond, as if he had chosen this route on purpose.

  The justice glanced from the window as the limo snaked past the steps leading up to the Supreme Court. He could see several capitol police officers handcuffing a man and a woman who were holding signs. One read: “Christ = Truth / Allah, Buddha, Sidharta = Liars.” Another read: “Jesus Is Coming to Judge the Judges.”

  Justice Lapham had dissented bitterly in Marquis v. United States of America, but he could only woo three other votes to his side in that case. His dissent went beyond the bounds of anything he had ever written before in a decision — calling it a “constitutional atrocity” for the majority to have upheld the hate speech provisions of the international treaty pushed by President Tulrude and ratified by the senate. He was now witnessing the toxic aftermath of that treaty with his own eyes. But there was something worse, and it made him cringe. Lapham considered the court’s decision in Marquis to have been a betrayal of the oath taken by the five other justices who formed the majority in that court opinion. After all, there was that matter of an oath taken by the justices — all of them — to uphold the Constitution. When exactly, he wondered, does bad judicial reasoning drift into treason, like a wayward youth who finally takes up the enticing invitation to join the local gang?

  For a fleeting moment he entertained, once again, the idea of retirement. To go fishing in the Gulf on his forty-footer; going after that worthy fighter, the yellow-finned tuna, or the elegantly powerful sailfish that he would catch and release; traveling the world slow and easy, with his wife at his side … Perhaps he would accept the permanent invitation to become an elder in his hometown Bible church in Wilmington, North Carolina.

  Now it almost seemed as if he had the taste of vinegar in his mouth as the limo cruised away from the scene. It was the bitterness of gall, that his own country seemed to be slipping into legal oblivion. But then, this was not just a legal issue, and Lapham knew it. By and large, most judges he knew expressed little compulsion to honor the great Lawgiver. The words of one of his favorite poets, William Butler Yeats, haunted his mind more than ever lately. Its harrowing vision of the disintegration of civilization seemed to be ever before him — just as in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which he knew by heart:

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

  FORTY-SIX

  SIA Headquarters

  In his office, Jeremy was back on duty. Taking tentative sips of his still-too-hot paper cup of French vanilla coffee, he read the tracking report on Abigail Jordan. The surveillance chain had broken temporarily in the state of Washington. Then it was picked up again when the SIA facial recognition software made a match, verified by the Likely Route Estimator program: she had boarded her private jet in Seattle with a flight destination of Reagan National Airport in D.C.

  Jeremy tapped in the search for FAA radar results. The jet was now approaching Columbus, Ohio.

  The radar read: “Permission to land received by the tower in Columbus.”

  He took another sip. Better now, the coffee was hot but not scalding.

  “Permission to land granted.”

  Ten minutes later, another posting on the FAA update quadrant of his screen.

  “Citation X cleared to land at the Rapid Air commercial delivery hangar.”

  On the jet, Abigail put down her legal file and stretched. Cal was awake next to her. He looked out the window at the Ohio landscape. “You know they’ll be waiting for you,” he said, still gazing out the window. There was a resignation in his voice.

  “Yes. They won’t give up.” As he turned his face from the window to face her, she added, “And neither will I.”

  “Abby and Cal,” the pilot said, adjusting his sunglasses and donning his cap, “we’ll be landing shortly. We’re going into our final descent.”

  Abigail knew what that meant. And what she had to do.

  At his tracking desk Jerem
y touched the screen to view all the camera shots at the Columbus airport. He saw three angles. A small Rapid Air jet was being loaded with boxes. Some members of the ground crew were hovering around the jet, finishing the preflight check.

  Jeremy hit the local police alert. A few minutes later the Columbus airport police said they would dispatch two squads to the hangar as soon as they finished the execution of a warrant on a fugitive who had just entered the passenger terminal.

  The Citation X was rolling down the runway into view. It taxied up to the hangar and stopped.

  “Better hurry,” Jeremy said into his voice monitor. “They’ve landed.”

  The airport security officer responded, “Your subjects will not be leaving the airport — at least not on the ground,” the officer replied. “We’ve relayed your request to every road leading from the commercial hangar. Tollgates are all shut now. Your subject can’t get past any of them.”

  One of his fellow SIA staffers strolled in and began asking him about the upcoming agency bowling tournament, but Jeremy’s eyes never left the screen. He shot his left hand up in the air. “Can’t talk. Following a Red Notice here.”

  “Oooh,” came the cynical response, “excuse me, Mr. Bounty Hunter of cyber space,” and he left.

  The camera shots on Jeremy’s monitor showed the door of the Citation X opening. He saw the pilot, in his sunglasses and cap, and his flight case in hand, walking down the steps and darting quickly into the hangar.

  “What’s this?” Jeremy shouted. He waited a minute, then decided to hit the speed dial number for the hangar desk clerk. But before he could, the pilot, with his flight case, came striding back out of the hangar and quickly mounted the stairs and entered the Citation X, closing the door behind him.

  “What’s the matter,” Jeremy said, questioning the image on the screen, “don’t those expensive private jets have their own bathrooms? This doesn’t look right.”

  The two pilots and a navigator of the Rapid Air commercial jet walked out and climbed up the stairs. The pilots could be seen strapping themselves into the cockpit. Jeremy hit the airport tower alert line. “Request a stop on a private passenger jet on the tarmac.”

  The Citation X was already taxiing down the runway.

  “SIA, you need to give us the FAA stop order number” came the response.

  “Forget it,” Jeremy grumbled, “too late. Bathroom break completed. Or whatever …” It was the whatever that bothered Jeremy.

  “Say again?”

  “Never mind. The private jet is already back in the air.” Then Jeremy said to himself, “Okay, now I’m bringing it, Mrs. Jordan. The full force of the SIA’s coming down on you at Reagan National. Last stop. We’ll be waiting.”

  Jeremy touched the All Agency Enforcement tab on the screen. Boxes for FBI, SIA, Homeland Security, D.C. Police, Secret Service, and Airport Security appeared. One by one, Jeremy touched every box on the screen. Each time, he typed the Red Notice file number to authenticate his request.

  It took only fifteen minutes for each of the agencies to respond. All but the Secret Service and Homeland Security verified that officials were on the way to the private charter flight section of Reagan National Airport. Two FBI agents, two SIA officials, two squad cars full of D.C. police, and an armed airport security officer had been dispatched. The full fire power would arrive at the tarmac within thirty minutes. More than enough time. The Citation X would not land for at least forty-five minutes, maybe longer.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Nablus, Palestinian authority

  Ethan sat exhausted at the dining room table. He slept little the night before, tossing and turning as if electric currents were racing through his body. He couldn’t shut his mind down. Pastor Ibrahim Kalid and his quiet, pleasant wife and their two daughters had all been cordial — overly accommodating, in fact, during his stay in their modest cement-block house.

  The pastor’s wife was now serving Ethan another enormous meal, this time a midafternoon snack of tea, falafel, hummus, dates, and olives. Joshua was in the other room with Pastor Ibrahim, praying. Ethan gave the woman a weak smile.

  “Eat, please,” she said. “You are a big man; you need much food.”

  “Any more, Mrs. Kalid, and you will make me too big.” He patted his stomach, and she smiled and shook her head.

  He reached out and picked up a soft date and popped it in his mouth, pulling the sweet fruit away from the seed with his tongue and then plucking the seed out of his mouth with his fingers and putting it on the brightly painted plate in front of him.

  “Good dates,” he said.

  She smiled. Ethan felt awkward alone in the room with this woman, so he tried to make conversation. “So, have you — and your family — always been Christians?”

  “No,” she replied, “we were Muslim, like most here in Nablus.”

  “So, you changed?”

  “Yes, took Jesus into our hearts.”

  “Has that … caused you problems? With your neighbors, I mean?”

  She shrugged and said, “A little, yes.”

  Ethan was tempted to explore that. He knew enough to understand that these people must be viewed as infidels by others in their town. Now they were harboring Joshua Jordan, a man targeted by Islamic terrorists — in fact, one of their Imams had issued a fatwa against him. He wondered if the Kalid family had ever received death threats for their new faith or had even been the targets of violence because they were now following Jesus.

  But Ethan decided not to pursue it. Instead he said, “Mrs. Kalid, you are very brave to have us stay with you. I really appreciate it.”

  She said something in return, but he couldn’t decipher it through her thick Arabic accent. His face must have registered a question because she articulated the comment once again, but much more slowly: “I am being the Good Samaritan, like Jesus say.”

  “I see.”

  Ethan felt a flush of embarrassment, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because, looking at this quiet woman now, he was in the presence of an astounding mixture of character traits — simple purity of motives coupled with some incredibly big-time courage. How could he explain that? He didn’t know. But it seemed to amplify his own shortcomings.

  The door to the adjoining room opened and Joshua and Pastor Ibrahim walked out. Joshua had his Allfone in one hand and with his other shook hands with the pastor. He then glanced over at Ethan. The look on Joshua’s face seemed to possess an answer to a question that Ethan hadn’t even asked yet.

  Josh motioned for Ethan to follow him over to the other side of the room, and lowered his voice. “I just received a message from Joel Harmon,” he said. “IDF command wants to talk to me about finishing our RTS refinement after all.”

  “What? Israel was tracking us down. I thought the prime minister wanted you in custody and turned over to the FBI for extradition?”

  “He did. But then things changed, and they’re willing to let bygones be bygones if I help them now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t have all the details. But it seems the threat level has just been raised.”

  “What kind of threat?”

  “Biological. In the hands of bad guys. That’s all I know. The IDF’s begging for us to help them to achieve full redirection capacity for the RTS defense system. So, I’m guessing that they anticipate a missile strike with some kind of nightmare biological warhead. They must want to make sure they can redirect the missiles to a full spectrum of alternate destinations — away from population centers.”

  “That’s good news, then,” Ethan beamed. “We can come out of hiding.”

  “Good news and bad news.”

  “What’s the bad part?”

  “The RTS tests I’ve run here in Israel haven’t done the trick yet, to accomplish the higher level of control over the guidance systems of incoming missiles. That’s what the Israelis want. But I’ve got an idea on how to get that RTS enhancement to happen. I hope …”

&n
bsp; “You’ll figure it out,” Ethan said, worried but trying to sound convincing.

  “I just hope by the time I figure it out,” Joshua said, “it’s not too late.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  In the early morning hours, around 6:45 a.m., the nurses at Georgetown University Hospital were making their rounds. One of them was attending to attorney Harry Smythe, who was hooked up to a heart monitor. He had not been a happy patient. He kept talking about a case he might have to argue in court for some lady named Abigail Jordan. The nurse assured him he was going nowhere. He would have to remain in the hospital for several more days at least.

  At 6:45 a.m., Jeremy was looking at his monitor, which was full of video images of the hangar and part of the D.C. Reagan Airport tarmac. The director was standing next to him, and behind him were several SIA staffers who had heard about the upcoming arrival.

  Jeremy saw that the area around the hangar where the charter flights and private jets would dock was surrounded by armed federal agents and local police. On his audio hookup, Jeremy could hear the Citation X radio the tower for permission to land. It was quickly granted. The jet was descending. The FBI had taken the lead in coordinating the task force on the ground and would soon give the go ahead to approach the jet. “Hold positions,” the senior FBI agent said over the radio.

  The Citation X slowed as it approached the tarmac apron in front of the hangar. Then it halted.

  “Perfect position,” the FBI agent said to his team members. “Wait till we verify the engines are off.”

  The engines of the Citation X were cut, and the roar began to wind down to a whine and then a quiet whirring. The FBI agent counted down slowly from ten. When he got to one, he shouted into the radio, “Now, go, go, go!”