“Well, that’s just it,” said McCoy. “They’ve got huge reserves of oil and natural gas. There’s absolutely no need for Iran to develop nuclear power, unless it’s to convert the spent fuel into highly enriched uranium in order to produce nuclear weapons — which is exactly what we suspect is happening, with Russian collusion.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying, add it all up. Moscow and Tehran are building a strategic alliance. They’ve been working on it for two decades while the world has focused its attention elsewhere, and Gogolov and Jibril are right at the heart of it all. Why in the world would Iran suddenly bite the hand that arms it? Why would they authorize Gogolov and Jibril to take out a Russian airliner? It just doesn’t make sense.”
McCoy had a point. She often did. And Bennett loved to see her mind at work, processing the data and looking for connections and relationships no one else could see. Even when she was wrong she had a way of sounding right. But she wasn’t often wrong. He’d learned that the hard way.
She once predicted that Libya would cry uncle after Saddam’s regime was toppled, giving up her weapons of mass destruction in return for an end to economic sanctions and the ability to start selling oil again. Bennett had told her she was crazy and had bet her a thousand dollars that Khadaffi would never cut such a deal with the U.S. or the U.N. as long as he was alive. But McCoy had been right. Bennett’s only consolation was that she let him pay off his debt to her by taking her out to dinner at the most expensive restaurants in whatever city to which their never-ending shuttle diplomacy took them.
Bennett stared into his coffee. He couldn’t even remember how many cups he’d had since midnight, or how many aspirin and antacids he’d downed. His head was still throbbing. His entire body ached. He desperately needed sleep, as did McCoy, and for a moment, he let his mind drift from the conversation, important though it was.
He wanted time alone with McCoy, time to make some initial plans for the wedding and time to talk about their future beyond government. They needed to get off this political bullet train before it killed them. Working for the White House was starting to feel more like a prison sentence than an act of public service. They’d both done their time. It was time to get out and start a life of their own.
But how? Bennett had hoped to announce his resignation as soon as a final status agreement was agreed to by the Israelis and Palestinians, and by the “Quartet”—the U.S., Russia, the E.U., and the U.N., the four major facilitators of the peace process. He had thought that would be a matter of weeks. But now everything for which Bennett and McCoy had been working for the past three years was suddenly at risk.
The Russians were putting the peace talks on hold. For how long? Without their cooperation it would be difficult, if not impossible, to nail down a final deal. How exactly were they supposed to secure the Kremlin’s sign-off on the final language of the treaty if Vadim refused to even pick up the phone and take the president’s call?
The phone rang. It was the director of Central Intelligence for McCoy.
Bennett silently ran through his options. Until he made contact with either Vadim or his senior staff, there wasn’t much else he could do. So he picked up the phone and dialed Russian foreign minister Aleksandr Golitsyn’s private cell phone for the third time in the past three hours. There was no answer.
“Mr. Foreign Minister, it’s Jon Bennett again. I’d appreciate anything you can do to open up direct talks between our two presidents again. Please call me back, regardless of the hour. Also, I’m sitting here with Erin, and we’d like to confirm our dinner meeting tomorrow night. Please let me know. Thanks.”
Bennett fought the almost overwhelming urge to curse. He was growing restless and desperate. Someone out there had attacked the United States and, for all he knew, was planning to do it again, perhaps in the next days or even hours. At this point neither he nor McCoy had any idea who they were or how to stop them, and the Russians were treating them like the enemy.
Mordechai sipped a cup of hot tea and looked at his watch.
In a few hours he would leave his richly appointed room to meet President Al-Hassani.
He paged through the briefing book the Israeli Foreign Ministry had prepared for him. Much of the material was based on sources he himself had developed over the years. But a few stories in the appendix did catch his eye.
BABYLON IS BEING REBUILT
TO LURE TOURISTS AND BUILD IRAQI MORALE
Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 1986
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S REVENGE:
IRAQ FLEXES ITS MUSCLES
BY REBUILDING BABYLON
San Francisco Chronicle, April 30, 1989
NEW BABYLON IS STALLED
BY A MODERN UPHEAVAL
New York Times, October 11, 1990
To these were added newer stories from the past few months describing Iraq’s startling plans to move its capital to Babylon. “Baghdad was Saddam’s capital, and we are trying to forget Saddam,” one unnamed senior Iraqi official had told the Washington Post. “Babylon was the heart of our ancient empire, and she is the soul of our future.”
Mordechai doubted the Mossad analysts back in Jerusalem had any idea of the significance of such articles, much less the events they described. To his former colleagues such stories were mere curiosities. But to him, they were evidence of a Rubicon crossed.
Perhaps their ignorance was not their fault. They were young and brash, as he had once been. They were so sure they understood the world in all its complexities when, in fact, they were missing the dawn of its horrific last days.
There was a time he hadn’t understood the importance of such developments either. How could he expect others to understand without knowing what he knew?
It was Yael who had first become fascinated by ancient Hebrew prophecies after taking a few courses on biblical archeology. Her professor had claimed that prophecies were sort of supernatural puzzles, riddles that, once decoded, could explain the mysteries of the universe and allow mankind to peer into the future.
Mordechai had dismissed her interest, at first, as another one of her many hobbies—“the trivial pursuit of all things Jewish,” he used to say.
But the more he learned, the more intrigued he became. Yael began to talk about passages like Jeremiah 31:8—“Behold, I am bringing them from the north country, and I will gather them from the remote parts of the earth”—predicting the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel from all over the world, including “the north country,” like Russia, from which Mordechai’s family had escaped. She began showing him passages like Ezekiel 36 and 37, predicting the rebirth of the Jewish State of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust, thousands of years before any of it happened.
And one day she had come across a series of prophecies predicting the eventual rise of ancient Babylon from the sands of Iraq, the rise of Babylon as a fearsome and terrifying global power and a mortal threat to the Jewish people and the peace of mankind. And suddenly Mordechai’s interest was no longer casual and personal. It was immediate and professional.
Could prophecy actually help him as the head of the Mossad to predict the future?
Mordechai’s parents had been atheists. They had neither known nor cared what the ancient Scriptures had to say about the past, much less the future. Had they been wrong? Was the Bible somehow relevant to a modern life?
Here he was, en route to Babylon.
And no longer was the rebuilding of this ancient city merely the pet project of a demonic despot or some kind of Middle Eastern EPCOT Center.