The Second Messiah

“Good. You know what to do next, Savage. Any mistakes, any involvement by the Israelis, police or military, or anyone else, and Jack Cane is a corpse. Is that very clear?”

Savage’s voice was flecked with a mix of fear and anger. “I’m pleading with you not to harm Jack.”

“Do exactly as you’ve been told and he won’t be. But disobey my instructions, and I swear he’ll die. I’ve told you the rules. You come alone, Savage.”

“I heard you the first time you called.”

“And you had better not be armed.”

“Do you think I’m crazy? I told you, I’ll do whatever you say.”

“We meet in an hour, the place where I said. I’ll call you then.”

“What about cell phone reception in the area? It can’t be that great.”

“Don’t worry, Savage. There’s enough signal coverage.” The line clicked dead.

Savage’s face twisted and he spat the words. “You better be sure about that, pal.”

He punched in another number on the cell phone’s keypad.

When a voice answered, he spoke for at least five minutes before he terminated the call and tossed the phone on the passenger seat.

Then he swung the Land Cruiser east, toward the Jordanian border.

131

The desert airfield was fifteen miles inside Jordan’s border, near the Dead Sea. It had long ago been abandoned. Weeds grew on the cracked concrete, a perfect home to lizards, snakes, and scorpions, and camel thorn bush blew across it when the desert wind shrieked. But that early morning the wind was calm and the landing conditions near perfect, despite the darkness.

The runway had last seen service over twenty years ago by the Jordanian air force. Now the control tower was a derelict mess. Every window was broken, the doors and plumbing scavenged.

Two hours earlier a convoy of pickup trucks had drawn up.

At least two dozen Bedu men jumped down. A pair of the pickups kept their lights dimmed as they drove along the runway, the men working in front as they swept away gravel and rocks and removed any foreign objects from the concrete until the runway was clear of all debris.

A young man wearing spectacles and a Bedu headdress checked the wind direction. The air was still as a rock. Then he climbed into one of the pickup trucks and drove to the far end of the runway, reversing the truck a few yards out into the desert before he halted and jumped out.

An object in the back of the truck was covered with a rainproof tarpaulin and he ripped it away. Underneath was a radio transmitter dish hooked up to a portable power supply and a laptop.

As the young man switched on the laptop, his comrades in two of the other pickups drove along each side of the runway, stopping every sixty feet and placing plastic, battery-operated electric lanterns on the runway’s edge, then adjourned to the runway’s edge to brew tea on a battered portable Primus stove.

The young man watched the laptop’s bright blue screen fill with data as the portable Instrument Landing System computer worked through its loading sequence. A motor whirred and adjusted the radio dish to transmit the glide slope at a perfect three-degree angle. Minutes later, the computer finished its setup.

Satisfied, the young man grinned to himself, jumped down off the truck, and then went to join his comrades making tea.

132

Jack felt a sinking sensation again as the Lear nosed down.

Yasmin peered out the oval starboard window. A few weak streaks of dawn’s burnt orange light tinted the cabin. “We’ll be landing soon.”

They were alone. Hassan and the Serb had moved into the rear cabin. Yasmin sat back in her seat and looked over at him. “No doubt you want to know why I tricked you.”

“I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind. What’s your real name?”

“Fawzi.”

“I think I preferred Yasmin. In fact, let’s keep it simple and I call you Yasmin.”

She shrugged, her face even more beautiful in the cabin’s soft light. “Can I say something, Jack? We both know what pain is. You lost your parents. I lost mine. Do you know how my mother died?”

“No.”

Her eyes misted with pain. “I was five. The day my father died she went to Jerusalem on the pretence of being consoled by her sister. Instead, my mother hung herself. All because she couldn’t stand the indignity of raising a family without her husband. My world fell apart that day.”

“I never knew.”

“Had it not been for Hassan, Nidal and I probably would have starved to death in some gutter. But Hassan was always such a good brother to us. He begged, he stole, his own belly went hungry so he could feed us. He did whatever he had to do to keep us together. Many evenings I saw the calluses on his hands and the exhaustion in his eyes from hard work. He was still not much more than a child himself.”

“So you helped him out of a sense of duty.”

“You make it sound so flippant, Jack.”

“I didn’t mean to. I’m just stating a fact.”