“If these things are programmed or prophesied, then what’s the use in doing anything if it can be undone by a divine plan?”
“Maybe all is not foretold, all not revealed. There are other forces that tempt the foundation, the hearts in men.”
“The last time I was here you mentioned Solomon’s Temple. Newton gives his estimates to the size of the building. You said a foundation might exist. If so, it would have to be below the streets. Do you know of any remnants, cornerstones and underground settings that might indicate the size of the temple?”
Bahir stared out the window, light from the setting sun floating in his black eyes. He looked back at Marcus. “You are searching for things perhaps better left in history, tucked away in the Old Testament and buried by centuries of armies, rebuilt and buried again. The temple may exist in God’s kingdom, but no one since Christ has seen that. Discovering this information might take you to places no man would wish to journey.”
“What are you saying?”
“The road may lead to edges of the world, above and below — to destinations unimaginable in the human mind. What if the glass is dark, like the surface of still, deep water and you only see the reflection of your own face? Or, what if you looked through the glass into the face of God? What would you ask him?”
“The name of the man who killed my wife and daughter.”
“And, if it is revealed to you?”
“I’d find him.”
“Then what would you do?”
“Kill him.”
Bahir said nothing, his eyes filled with gentleness.
“So there are no underground areas, places marking the foundation of the temple, correct?” Marcus asked.
“I did not say that. There are no easy thresholds to cross. Many years ago, two British archeologists, Charles Warren and Charles Wilson explored underground Jerusalem.”
“What’d they find?”
“They were looking for some of the original foundations of the Holy Temple. There are said to be many tunnels beneath the Old City. Some think they were looking to discover a secret room known as the Holy of Holies.”
“What’s that?”
“God’s sitting room — a place of seclusion, a room for reflection. It is believed the Ark of the Covenant was, at one time, kept there.”
“What happened to the tunnels, access to the underground?”
“Some tunnels have intentionally been blocked. Whether it is by man or God’s hand, I do not know. This valley, from here to the Dead Sea, seems to get a major earthquake every eighty to ninety years. The last was in 1927. More than five hundred people died. In 1837, five thousand people perished. We are past due for another earthquake.”
“Are there any tunnels, sealed or hidden, that might lead beneath Solomon’s Temple?”
“Only someone as wise as Solomon could answer that. However, when the Queen of Sheba asked Solomon what are the most certain things in life, and what are the most uncertain, the king responded by saying, ‘The most certain thing in the world is death. The most uncertain, is a man or woman’s share in the world to come.’ For you to discover the answer to the second part, you may have to become a branch of the world to come.”
“The world to come — you mean the future? No offense, Bahir, but it’d be nice to get a straight answer from you, Isaac Newton, or the Bible.”
Bahir lowered his eyes for a moment. He raised them up to meet Marcus’s concentrated stare. “Paul, the answers are there. Perhaps you are not asking the right questions.”
Marcus’s cell rang.
UNKNOWN
“Bahir, can you watch my computer? I need to take this.”
“Of course.”
Marcus stood and walked to the door as Alicia Quincy came on the line.
FORTY
“Hold on,” Marcus said into the phone, waiting for two men on motorcycles to pass. A church tour group walking around him followed in the same direction. “Okay, I can talk,” he said, stepping off the street under the shade of a cedar tree a half block down from the coffee shop.
“Thank goodness all went well with the ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial. Bill Gray said if I hear from you to let you know the sky isn’t falling.”
“What if it had? What would he have said if there had been a double assassination on live television?”
“Paul, Bill is your friend. Let’s move on. Since you mentioned assassination, which leads me to the Syrian, Abdul Hannon, he was really an Iranian-born physicist. He’d gone to North Korea, by invitation, ostensibly to tour their nuclear facilities. It’s believed he came back with extensive details, and a good working knowledge, to continue the Syrian effort to build a nuclear power plant in the area near the town of Palmyra. It’s not publicly known who took him out.”
“Who’s suspected of doing it?”
“Mossad. They might be the same people trying to hack your work.”
“Why, if I’m here on the invitation of the Hebrew University?”
“I can’t answer that. But I had a friend at Cyber Command in Fort Mead help me. The hacker appears to be coming from Tel Aviv, deep in the center of the city. It could be the Mossad.”
“Or it might be someone making it seem like it’s the Mossad.”
“If we heard chatter about you, so did others. Some of the computers we have now can cyber sniff twice around the world in the milliseconds it takes a person to blink once. No weapon on earth is that fast, and potentially that destructive if hackers can penetrate military walls or national power grids. Do you think the Kennedy stuff along with the information about the oil spill has somebody worried?”
“I wasn’t right about an attempt on the prime minister’s life.”
“Maybe it had something to do with the assassination in 1995 of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Maybe you just uncovered it years after it happened. I did some research on that, the killing occurred near city hall in Tel Aviv. I couldn’t find a garden or anything representative of a weeping angel near it. Rabin was shot on the fourth of November, not the tenth. Oh, that reminds me…I’ve uncovered information that indicates Yitzhak Rabin worked under that guy you mentioned, David Marcus. Marcus left Nuremberg after the trials got underway and relocated in what was about to become the State of Israel, but not until he helped them win a war. David Marcus, along with Rabin and others, such as Ben Gurion, were the chief architects of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.”
Marcus blew out a breath. He scanned his immediate area. Tourists strolled through the Old City, an international parade of cultures, stopping to examine the wares of street merchants who could read body language easier than the written word. Marcus felt a headache forming behind his eyes. “You know, Alicia, this stuff that keeps happening? Maybe it’s for some kind of reason, and we’re just part of the current.”
She laughed softly. “Are you saying go with the flow?”
“It’s as if the books in the Bible are definitive yet still a mystery of the world, part of the cosmos that’s a mix of science and faith. I’m trying to find the edge, maybe the edge of time, to build some kind of clear image. But I can only find little pieces — pieces that alone don’t paint a wide swath. It’s like trying to look through a stained glass window, too dark at night and too colorful in the day.”
Marcus paused, the Ardon stained glass paintings. He visualized the large stained glass windows in the Hebrew University library and thought about what Bahir had said, “Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then come face to face. Today I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
“What’d you say?”
“I’m just thinking out loud. It was something an old man in a coffee shop mentioned to me. It’s from the Bible.”