Authors: Steven Savile
Silver (40 page)
Orla stretched, the steel cuffs cutting deep into her wrists. The blinding agony gave her another inch. She dragged the Jericho toward her.
Sokol came lurching out of the darkness, his ruined face like something out of a nightmare. He could barely stand. He staggered two steps sideways for every two forward. Orla reached down for the gun, the chain grating as it slid through the coupling. She gripped it with both hands and squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was deafening in the close confines of the cell. The bullet took Sokol in the shoulder, jerking him back a zombie-step. She fired again. The second shot took him in the other shoulder. He roared in agony. Blind rage drove him forward two more steps until he was close enough she could feel his erection die as the third slug pierced his skull. He collapsed at her feet.
Gasping, Orla leaned back and tried to put a bullet into the coupling in the ceiling. She missed with the fourth. The fifth split it.
The Jericho 941 shipped with different barrels, a 9x19mm parabellum and a .41 “hot cartridge.” The difference was three shots. She either had ten shots left or seven, depending if Sokol had kept the gun fully loaded. She prayed she wouldn’t have to find out the hard way.
Orla put her left hand against the wall and blew out the cuff’s coupling. She didn’t bother wasting a bullet on the right cuff. Nine or six left. She kept a running count. She fed the loose chain through the cuff and padded over to the open door. The gunshots had made a lot of noise. Anyone inside the building would have heard them. She willed them on. She had a gun and a need to strike back. She wanted to hurt them for what they’d done to her. She wanted to kill them for what they had done to the girl before her, and for making her watch as they did it.
She ran the numbers. Schnur had claimed the Shrieks worked as blind cells, one person connected to two others, the guy below them and the guy above them in the chain. They would never risk having more than two operatives in the same place, as it exposed an extra link in the chain; and extra links weakened the chain. That was the whole point of blind cells. But Sokol had said the others would be here soon, and
others
was plural. The guy below Sokol in the chain, and Gavrel Schnur. Schnur had said Mabus liked to be a part of the beheadings when they filmed them. He had told her that in his office in the IDF HQ.
Schnur was Mabus. She was sure of that. It was the only explanation that made sense. He had fed her a bullshit story about Solomon being Mabus, but that is all it was, a bullshit story. Schnur was Mabus. And if Schnur was Mabus, he not only knew who Akim Caspi really was, he was the only person who did, because Caspi was the man above him in the chain. She had had time to think about it while they hung her up like a chicken waiting for the slaughter. Akim Caspi was the man who had recruited Schnur. He had to be. There was no other scenario that made sense. Mabus was only ever the herald, the piper at the gates of dawn. Solomon, though, Solomon was the Antichrist to Schnur’s herald, the real evil—and Schnur had given them his name.
It was a mistake.
A slip.
He had said more than he should have.
And she was in the mood to make him pay for that.
She looked down the narrow passageway but didn’t see anyone coming. There was a single naked bulb at the far end, and beneath it, the first stair leading up. She ran back to Uzzi Sokol’s corpse and took the shirt from his back. He had no need for it, and she didn’t want to step out into the middle of Tel Aviv buck naked with a gun if she didn’t have to. She’d be drawing enough attention to herself even with the shirt.
She checked his pockets for a spare ammo clip. He didn’t
have one. She could have popped the magazine and counted
out the bullets, but she didn’t want to take the time—not here. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, and any extra seconds were wasted seconds.
She buttoned the shirt up quickly and then ran down the narrow passage. There was a door at the bottom, just before the stairs, a rusty iron thing that appeared to have been welded shut. She checked it just in case. Ipasst give. That was enough for her. She ran barefoot up the stairs, slowing just before she reached the top. She checked left and right. There was no one there. Sokol had come planning to play. He’d known he was alone and would be for a while.
She was on the ground floor now. To the right she could see the interior of a small grocery store. There were no groceries on the shelves. It had been bombed out during the hostilities. To the left was the store room. It was a perfect place to hide someone. The entire strip mall was probably deserted. She went for the door.
The shop floor was thick with dust and broken glass. The windows had been boarded up. It was convenient. It meant no one could see inside. She walked over the broken glass, cutting the souls of her feet. She barely felt the thin shards as they dug in deep. Behind her Orla left a trail of bloody footprints.
She looked back over her shoulder to be sure no one was following and that no one was lurking in the shelves to jump out at her. She reached the door. It was locked and chained. She didn’t hesitate. She put a single shot into the center of the lock’s hasp and unthreaded the chain as it splintered and the tongue came loose. The door itself was locked. She realized then the stupidity of shooting out the lock. The door being chained on the inside meant Sokol and the others had a different way of coming and going. Probably an old goods door around the back of the shop. She couldn’t worry about it now. She had eight or five left. Another one into the lock would make it seven or four if the gun had been fully loaded when Sokol came to torment her. Less if not. The numbers were getting a little low for her liking.
Instead of shooting the final lock she tested the integrity of the boards on the windows. They were flimsy at best. She looked around the little grocery store for something she could use. Back by the till she found one of three old shopping carts. They were buckled and twisted where the heat from the mortar fire had warped them, but they’d be fine for what she had in mind. Orla wrestled one of the carts free of the others. The wheels were buckled and it didn’t want to roll on them. It didn’t matter. She dragged it back far enough to give her a run at the boarded-up window, then launched herself at it, running full-tilt forward with the cart out in front of her like a battering ram.
The cart hit the boards and kept on going through them as she ran.
She heard screaming.
It sounded like a mad banshee inside her head.
It took her a moment to realize it was her.
And then the boards tore free and daylight came flooding in.
Head down, Orla staggered out onto the street, tears streaming down her cheeks.
She breathed in the hot morning air.
She was alive.
Sokol was dead.
That was all that mattered to her.
She stumbled barefoot toward the side of the road. She needed to get as far away from this place as she could.
Cars passed her on the street. She held out her hand, trying to hitch a ride. A few slowed, then accelerated, seeing the gun and the mess she was in. Just when she was beginning to think there were no good Samaritans on the road to Tel Aviv a white SUV slowed. She tensed, expecting to see the toad behind the wheel. If it had been Gavrel Schnur driving she would have shot him through the windshield without a second thought. It wasn’t. It was a middle-aged man with his wife in the seat beside him. Orla stumbled toward the passenger door as the car slowed to a stop at the side of the road.
The woman rolled down her window, took one look at Orla half-naked, battered and bruised and holding the Jericho 941 as though it were a snake, and seemed to understand. She was young, maybe twenty-five herself, but she had grown up in the conflicts of Palestine and Israel; and in Orla she saw a victim. It was as simple as that. Orla guessed the woman had made her husband pull over. The stranger didn’t ask what happened, she simply said, “Get in.” And when Orla was inside the SUV, she said, “Drive.”
They peeled away from the curb and into the traffic.
There was a blonde-haired doll on the backseat. They had a daughter. She wasn’t in the car with them. Orla’s stomach tightened at the realization that the Barbie-ideal of womanhood transcended state and nation. In the passenger seat the woman turned to look at Orla in the back. Orla could see a dozen questions behind her eyes, not least of which was, what have we done? It was natural. People didn’t want to interpose themselves into situations where trouble was rife. But thankfully, her first instinct had been maternal, to protect. Questions were fine now; they were out of there and getting further and further away from the abandoned grocery store by the minute.
“Thank,” Orla said, for the second time in a few short minutes. This time she really meant it.
“What happened to you?”
It was the biggest of all of the potential questions. Too big for her to answer in the back of the car. Orla shook her head. She knew it would look like she was in shock. She looked at the woman and told her, “I thought I was going to die. You saved my life.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but it seemed to appease the woman for the moment at least. She had more questions, practical ones: Where are you from? Where are you staying? Do you want us to take you to the police station?
That was the last thing she wanted. She fended the constant barrage of questions with one of her own. “Do you have a cell phone?” The woman nodded. Of course they did. Everyone in the world had cell phones these days. “Do you mind if I make a call? I need to tell people I am okay.”
“Of course,” the woman fumbled about in her purse and handed a small gold D&G Motorola. Orla took it and flipped it open. She dialed in the +44 for England and prayed the dial tone wouldn’t cut off into the operator’s voice telling her that her service plan didn’t cover international calls. It didn’t. She punched in the rest of the numbers for Nonesuch.
Lethe picked up on the second ring. He sounded like he was in the car beside her as he said, “Go for Lethe.”
She breathed out a long shaky sigh. She hadn’t realized just how good it would be to hear a familiar voice. She closed her eyes and smiled. “Hey Jude.”
He answered her with the rest of the famous lyric, then said, “Are you okay? Ah, hell, stupid question, I know. I mean . . . are you . . . did they hurt you?”
“Yes,” she said, meaning yes she was okay, yes she was out of there, and yes they had hurt her, but not as much as she was going to hurt them. “I want an address, Jude. Gavrel Schnur. It should be in the Ramat district, North Tel Aviv. He’s with the IDF.”
“I’m on it, gimme a sec. It’s good to hear your voice, Orla. I thought I’d never . . .” He let the thought hang. He didn’t need to finish it. She’d had the thought often enough from the other side while she was down there in the dark cellar.
“I know,” she said. “Tell the old man I am coming home. I’ve just got one thing to clean up first.”
“I know. That’s why I am telling you, not him. Have you got that address for me?”
It was off the 481, close to the water. She knew the area. It wasn’t an area a young politician could afford, even if he was a rising star in the Likud party and favored of Menachem Begin, Shamir and Netanyahu. It was old money. Lots and lots of filthy old money. That should have been her first clue all the way back when she had been looking at the photograph of Schnur and his wife, Dassah. Schnur had to have got his money somehow, and that offshore account in Hottinger & Cie and all of those Silverthorn deposits were making an awful lot of sense to her now. The money came from Caspi. That was the joke wasn’t it? Made of Silver. And what was more Christian in terms of iconography than the crown of thorns? She stared out of the window, watching the streets go by.
“Who is he?”
“Mabus,” she said, grateful that the conversation only made sense to the pair of them. She smiled at the woman. It was meant to assure her that everything was fine. She was sure she looked mad.
“Be careful, Orla. Promise me.”
“I’ll be home soon,” she said. It wasn’t the promise he’d wanted, but it was the only one she was prepared to give him. She wasn’t about to be careful. The time for care had passed. She was hunting the man who had made her last few days a living hell. She hung up the phone on him and gave it back to the woman. “Thank you,” she said again. “I can’t pay for the call, I’m sorry. My money is all back at the hotel.”
“That’s okay, honey, don’t worry. Where are you staying?”
She gave them Gavrel Schnur’s address, the big house off the 481, down by the water.
She watched her
good Samaritans drive off into the blue sky of the coast road.
Staying in Tel Avivwas counter-intuitive. They would expect her to run, to get as far away from them as she could. Schnur wouldn’t expect her to go to his home and wait for him. It made no logical sense. But revenge wasn’t about logic.
There was no security gate, and no cameras that she could see. That didn’t mean they weren’t there.
She had so many questions. She wanted to ask him to his face why he had done it. Why had he plotted with Solomon and Devere to cause so much pain. She wanted to hear him justify himself? Was he going to blame the murder of his wife? The death of his son? And did it even matter what he said? It could never be justification enough. Hearing it might humanize the toad, but it could never make him human. Nothing could ever do that again.
She walked toward the house.
It was odd that he had never moved, given what had happened to his wife in the driveway, but she reasoned, perhaps he needed the constant reminder to fuel his hatred?
It was the middle of the day, broad daylight, so most likely the toad was at work, or heading to the grocery store basement to finish her. He wouldn’t be home until later. Which would give her time to break in and cover her tracks so that when he finally came home she would be waiting for him.
There wouldn’t be any questions, she decided.
She didn’t want to hear his answers.
The toad didn’t
come home for three hours.
It gave her time.
She sat at his desk, breathing in his lingering smell. Everything in the place reeked of Gavrel Schnur. Orla sat back in his high-backed leather chair, wearing one of his wife’s dresses. They were a similar size, if not exactly the same. Schnur had maintained her wardrobes as a shrine. Every garment still hung on its hanger, immaculately pressed. Her death really had affected him. She found a photograph of Dassah and styled her hair so that at first glance the toad might think there was an old ghost in his chair.
She rifled his drawers and searched the place for a safe. She couldn’t find one, but that didn’t mean the toad didn’t have his hiding places. Everyone had their hiding places. She tried his computer, but it was password protected; and she wasn’t remotely as tech-savvy as Lethe, so she simply pulled the hard drive out of the machine. She’d let Lethe play with it when she got home. She’d tell him it was a coming home present.
Orla swiveled the chair so it turned away from the door. He wouldn’t see her as he came into the room. She sat there alone, waiting. She remembered something he had said in his office. He’d told her that Judas Iscariot wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the Gospel of Peter and asked her what she thought of that. Now, thinking about it, she realized how odd that was. There was Peter, the rock on which the Church was founded, the first Apostle, and he didn’t have a word for the betrayal of his Lord? According to John, Peter was the swordsman who cut off the ear of Malchus when they came to arrest Christ. How could he have not written about Judas, then, if Judas really had been the great betrayer?
Then it occurred to her that perhaps Judas and Peter had in fact been one and the same, that Judas had written the Gospel accredited to Peter. It was a passion, one of the most prominent in early Christianity but denounced as heretical because it blamed Herod Antipas and not Pilate for the crucifixion. The resurrection and the ascension weren’t separate events, either. Where Matthew claimed Christ’s cry from the cross was “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?
Peter claimed
Christ was not calling to God but asking, “My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken me?” and when he had said it he was taken up. There was no death. The other thing she recalled was that there was no disloyalty in Peter’s story. The disciples were arrested for plotting to burn the temple. Could those have been Judas’ thoughts? Judas’ truths?
Peter was the rock the Church was founded upon. Judas’ was the sacrifice the Church was founded upon. Could they be one and the same? Did it even matter, or was Schnur just playing with her, running theosophical rings around her?
The one thing she could understand was that if the Disciples of Judas didn’t believe the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then there was no need for them to believe in redemption from man’s sins by the suffering on the cross. It was all propaganda and lies, after all, wasn’t it? Made up to sell this new ministry and creying with faith in retrospect. What was it the toad had said? All of these random acts of violence, hate, war and death made him think we weren’t redeemed at all, we were damned. She wondered if he actually believed the stuff he said, or if it was a convenient excuse to strike back at the people he believed had hurt him, the people behind his wife’s murder? Attacking an entire system of faith seemed a little extreme for that.
No, surely in Acts, Peter, Prince of the Apostles, stood up and decried Judas as a traitor? In the same passage he described Judas’ death in gory detail, his guts rupturing in the field of blood as he collapsed. Didn’t the Apostles welcome Matthias in Judas’ place? She could almost hear Schnur’s counter argument in her head: the Gospel of Luke names Jude for Thaddeus; John doesn’t name any of the twelve and adds his own Nathanael. All these testimonies and they can’t keep their key players straight? Peter being described alongside Judas in these other texts and not in his own? Was it revisionist history, trying to erase the sinner from the course of history? Or was it a case of trying to hide something else?
These other gospels were the ones that promised the miracles, the healing of the sick, the driving out demons, even raising the dead. There was nothing like that in Peter’s passion. The story of Akeldama was preposterous, Judas rupturing and exploding was like something out of a bad movie. It’s not even a convincing lie. And of course there were the problems of language. In the original texts the vocabulary was quite limited, meaning that the translations could be very easily made more explicitly divine should the translator wish. For instance, the prepositions
on
and
by
were often the same word in Aramaic, which would completely change the whole walking on water thing. Walking by water was far less impressive a feat. So what was Peter hiding? What truth did he not want recorded? If he wasn’t Judas, then perhaps he knew the truth about Judas?
It came back to the word messiah, didn’t it?
And if a messiah really was no more divine or god-touched than the one who brings peace and restoration to Israel, well then it couldn’t exactly be claimed that Judas’ kiss brought peace. For almost a century after either Christ or Judas the Romans were still suppressing the names Judaea and Jerusalem. The Jews were still exiles.
Israel was in her blood. She knew its history and its pains as well as any Jew. She had studied the Diaspora and the destruction of the First Temple. She understood the effect the destruction of the Second Temple had on the people. And she understood the hope Simon bar Kokhba had represented. Bar Kokhba had reestablished a Jewish state of Israel seven centuries after the Diaspora began, a state which he ruled as Nasri for three years, bringing the scattered Jews home. Surely, by Schnur’s definition this made Kokhba more effectively a messiah than either Judas or Jesus? For two of those years he fought tooth and naifont>
That was the way of the world though, was it not? History was written by the winners, not the valiant losers.
She didn’t have the answer.
Two millennia on no one did.
She didn’t think they were meant to.
It came down to faith. That was what all these contradictions came down to in the end. Some people needed to believe that Jesus suffered on the cross to redeem mankind’s sins. They needed to believe that there was a point, that the sacrifice of his earthly body meant something.
These words that so many clung to, so many drew faith from and believed in, could be twisted to say almost anything, and there was no way of knowing one way or the other what the truth was.
In the end it didn’t matter what she believed, what Schnur believed, what any of them believed. However improbable it was, Judas
could
be Peter, or he could be the Messiah, or a messiah; or he could be both or neither. It didn’t matter. People would find a way to twist the truth into whatever they wanted it to be.
That was the only truth.
And then it hit her, all of the messages, the prophecy of the Popes, the quatrains of Nostradamus, the lectures on the meaning of the word messiah, all of it. It wasn’t about Mabus ushering in the Antichrist, as Nostradamus had said, it was about a new messiah. Mabus was Caspi’s herald. He had said Caspi’s real name was Solomon. One sign of the Messiah was the restoration of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, and another was the rebuilding of the Temple. Who had built the First Temple?
Solomon.
It was Solomon’s Temple.
That was it. Caspi didn’t see himself as the Antichrist at al, he saw himself as the new Messiah. He was the man who was going to bring peace to Israel by creating a Jewish state. She didn’t believe for a minute that his real name was Solomon any more than it was Caspi.
Suddenly it all made sense. She saw how Gavrel Schnur had been recruited by Solomon to his cause. Dassah. It really had all been about his wife. That explained the shrine in his office and the shrine upstairs. She still dominated his life. Dassah Schnur had been murdered because of his vocal support of the Jewish presence on the West Bank and Gaza. He had never changed that position. He lived his entire life to that one fundamental truth. He wanted a homeland for the Jewish settlers. The PLO had murdered his wife because of it, which only made him want it more.
She understood Schnur’s role in her little triptych. He was the idealist who had been offered the one thing he always wanted.
Orla almost pitied him.
If Schnur was the idealist, the other roles were very easily defined. Miles Devere was the opportunist. There was money in death—there always had been—and he had started in Israel, in the very areas Schnur wanted to see a Jewish homeland. He understood the people and the politics and the needs of the region. Who better to help rebuild the infrastructure after the fallout? And, who better to be the grand architect and help build the new monument to Solomon’s messiah? Was that what he had offered Devere, the Last Temple? Surely it would be the most iconographic building of modern times. That would appeal to a man like Devere, even if the money and power didn’t.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was underestimating Miles Devere. There was a sinister undertone to his involvement. She recalled the payments into the Swiss bank made by Silverthorn and withdrawn by Caspi or Solomon or whatever his real name was. She remembered Humanity Capital and its modus operandi, how it stimulated unrest and promoted war for financial gain, and the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. Devere wasn’t some innocent attracted by Solomon, he was the money man. He was financing this war for a New Israel, pumping money into the Shrieks’ coffers, knowing that every dollar spent would in time be reaped five, six, eight, tenfold. It was what he did, he traded in human suffering and disaster.
The irony that Judas’ line was again being exploited for the gain of others didn’t escape her. As far as Devere was concerned it wasn’t about faith at all, it was about money. His own thirty pieces of silver.
She sat back in the chair. It was all there to see.
That left Solomon as the fanatic, the one man who really did believe all of it—the broken faith, the false church, the defamation of Judas—and through it all, the truth of what being a messiah really meant. It was never about being the son of God.
Surely that made him the most dangerous animal of them all, because a man like that couldn’t be reasoned with. Fanatics by definition weren’t open to reason. They didn’t want their eyes open to alternatives. And if they were persuasive, they could draw others closer to their flame of madness; but that wasn’t reason, that was trading on their rigid insanity. And he was insane. Make no bones about it. He could act the part in public—he could be convincing—but underneath the skin he was gone. That made him all the more frightening. A man like that would stop at nothing to see his dream of a new Jerusalem, a new recognized Israeli state for people of the one faith, come to pass. A man like that wouldn’t care if it meant stripping down the faiths of the Catholic Church and all of those other religions that didn’t subscribe to the glory of man. The trappings of religion and heresy were meat and potatoes to a man like that. It played into his messianic complex.
It was like a trail of breadcrumbs had been left for her to follow, and all the way she’d been picking them up and not thinking about what they really meant. But now she’d got it. She knew who they were. She knew how their roles fitted together. Everything made sense.
She called Lethe on the toad’s home phone and told him everything.
Then she waited for Mabus the Herald to come home.
And while she waited the sun went down.
Downstairs, she heard
the front door slam.
The toad was home.
She waited.
She heard him breathing heavily as he labored up the large staircase. Gavrel Schnur was a grotesque man. He was gasping hard, seriously out of breath, before he was even halfway through the ascent. Orla was patient. She waited, looking at her ghostly reflection in the glass.
The toad came into his study. He paused momentarily, stari the reflection of the devil in his wife’s blue dress, and then he composed himself. “Did you think seeing you in my wife’s dress, with your hair like that, would stop me from killing you?” he said. It was the last thing he ever said. Orla turned the chair around slowly. She looked at him. The arrogance faded when he saw the Jericho 941 she held low in her lap. She didn’t see the man responsible for torturing her. She didn’t see the man behind the terror attacks on Berlin and Rome and all of those other cities. She saw a fat, frightened man who had never recovered from losing his wife.