The days before the wedding passed quickly. Much that had been puzzling was clarified as the four friends spent long hours talking—sometimes in quiet sorrow for things past or regretted, sometimes in exuberant and joyous laughter as they rehearsed the ways in which God had led them to this hour. The tragic death of Viktor at the hands of an Archon after Carla had half-carried him out of the disintegrating auditorium and pleaded with him to accept Jesus was discussed with great sorrow.
Carla’s account of her surrender to the Lord and how He rescued her from the Nine brought great joy. The diabolically clever metamorphosis of Del Sasso and the probable increasing persecution of the Messiah’s followers in the near future as the New World Order was established was discussed with concern.
“What happens if the police are waiting for us?” asked Miriam. Looking down from clear skies at the menacing smog bank shrouding Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, she was reminded of the perils facing the two fugitives as soon as they landed. “Tel Aviv could have called by now.”
“Relax,” Ari admonished, putting a protective arm around her. “If we look nervous, they might take us for drug smugglers. Have a dog sniffing our bags and find that kosher sausage,” he added with a laugh.
“I’ll just hang on to your arm and look like I’m in love. How’s that?”
“Great. Just try to make it convincing.”
“Ari! I’m serious. Suppose the Mossad is down there waiting for this flight?”
“Can you be in the lobby of the King David in thirty minutes?” The urgency was apparent as soon as Yakov heard the voice on the other end of the line.
“Ah, David… I was just getting ready to go out to visit Ari. What’s up?”
“This is related. I’ll see you at the King David!” There was no hiding the suppressed excitement in his friend’s voice.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” asked Ari. With great effort, he directed the question to the new orderly who stood before him balancing a medical tray. “What’s your name?”
In one of his more lucid moments, Ari was sitting on his bed in his large, shared room. Having difficulty knowing where he was and remembering almost nothing since he had returned to Israel, he was, nevertheless, getting disjointed memory flashes of more distant events. The medic, who had just been assigned to this wing in the psychiatric hospital, had come into the room with two guards to administer medication.
Confined to a small apartment on one of Tel Aviv’s back streets and under constant guard, Ari found the next few months to be the most difficult period of his entire life. Miriam had promised to marry him as soon as possible—and now he was unable even to see her. In an earlier time, Ari would have made his escape and given the Mossad a run for their money. Now, however, instead of taking things into his own hands as he had always done in the past, he waited patiently for God to give him the direction he so urgently needed.
After about an hour’s wait, Ari was at last escorted in by a secretary. As soon as he entered the room he could sense the animosity. He was no longer one of them. He’d already been written off as the enemy.
Besides the Chief and David, the other four were strangers to Ari. He knew of them by reputation but had never met any of them, nor was he properly introduced now. The Chief simply recited their names and positions as a matter of formality. No one made a move to reach out and shake the hand Ari offered, then withdrew in embarrassment.
Early the next morning, David came by the apartment, picked up Ari and the tape he and Yakov had made the night before, and drove him to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. Wondering why it was required, Ari brought along the suitcase with two weeks’ change of clothing that he’d been told to pack. David looked grim but seemed unwilling or unable to explain his somber mood.
“Don’t say anything about being allowed to stay at your apartment last night,” David began as soon as they were in the car.
Take another look! Had he heard a voice? Or had the words just emerged from his mind? Take a closer look! There it was again, and still he couldn’t tell whether it was a voice speaking to him from outside or words sounding in his head. What did it mean? Take a closer look at what? At the fissure blocking his route? At possible ways to bridge it?
Hesitantly, Ari stood up and looked around. Nothing had changed. Go closer, to the very edge! Impelled by that command, he cautiously approached the brink once again and peered down into the void, then searched either side of that awesome chasm. The roar of the river below was nerve-shattering. Still he saw nothing that he hadn’t seen before—nothing to give him any hope.
Dead… alive… some state in between? Ari sensed only the searing pain suffusing his body. How long he’d lain there drifting in and out of consciousness he did not know. When at last he had fully regained his senses, he moved first one limb, then another, and decided that, though horribly bruised, he was all in one piece. Had any of the others survived?
“Hello!” he called out into the blackness. Nothing but echoes. “Anybody there?” he cried again. The echoes bounced back and forth as they faded into the distance—then absolute silence. Alone! That realization was suddenly terrifying. Where was he?
The press corps, limited to thirty reporters from the world’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines, and handpicked by Carla, had a block of seats in the center of the auditorium. No television coverage was allowed. Ari found his assigned place and sat down. Behind him, the delegates were pouring in. Ari found it strangely ominous to see these sophisticated political leaders jostling their way, seemingly as eager and excited as children at a Saturday movie matinee.
Ari had earlier heard the rumor circulating among the guests that the President of the United States had been deluged with requests from ambassadors, members of parliament, senators, and congressmen from around the world who were eager to attend. Thousands had apparently been turned away for lack of space. And now the small, three hundred-seat auditorium was filling rapidly with those fortunate enough to have been invited. Simultaneous translators were in their booths at the rear, and those delegates who were not proficient enough in English were putting on earphones and dialing their particular native language.
It was a long flight from Tel Aviv to London to Los Angeles, where they spent the night, then up to San Francisco the next morning. Due to limited space in the auditorium where the congress would be held, Israel had been allowed only one political delegate, Yetsak Kaufy, and one religious leader, Rabbi Mordechai Margolins, a popular and influential Lubavitcher—and one media representative, which, of course, was Ari. These three had seats together, and their animated discussion made the otherwise tedious flight pass more quickly.
The next two years were lonely ones. Miriam seldom came to Jerusalem. She was very friendly when, on rare occasions, she dropped in at Yakov’s apartment, but that almost made it more painful. There seemed no hope that any romantic relationship could be reestablished. The one thing Ari had to look forward to was his trip to California—and his impatience to face that challenge only made the months pass more slowly and monotonously.
Not that there were no events of great significance to monitor and analyze for his twice-weekly column. There were many. In spite of rank pessimism on both sides that it could ever actually take place, the Israelis and Arabs came together for historic face-to-face peace talks in Madrid before the end of October. They then moved to Washington, D.C., in December 1991, for the next phase in their negotiations. It all occurred precisely as Elor had said it would.
On May 13, 1991, an unusual news item came across the wires at The Jerusalem Post. Ari’s first reaction was to dismiss it as simply bizarre. The more he thought about it, however, the more intrigued he became. Late that afternoon, after some intensive research, Ari walked into the office of his editor, Ruta Cohen, and sat down to discuss his findings with her.
“What’s on your mind, Ari? Onto a scoop? I know that look,” said Ruta, when Ari had settled himself in a chair in front of her desk. Adjusting the oversize silver-rimmed glasses that lent her rather tall and very lean frame a scholarly look, the editor fixed Ari with the direct and piercing gaze that intimidated most of those under her.
By the time Ari returned, Yakov, who usually retired early, was already in bed and sound asleep. His peculiar whistling snore could be heard as Ari tiptoed down the hall and into his own room. Whatever his eccentricities, the old man’s religion had definitely cleansed his conscience and given him peace of mind. He seemed to drop off quickly and sleep soundly all night—and had scarcely expressed a worry since Ari had known him. “The Lord’s will is always best,” was a standard response when any difficulty did arise.
By contrast, Ari lay awake for a long time that night trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. He found himself in the uncomfortable but exhilarating position of being a double agent. Life had purpose once again… and excitement. That was what he loved. Danger was nothing to fear; it was a challenge to face and conquer. How to handle what lay before him was the question that troubled him now, and he lay awake turning the convoluted scenario over and over in his mind.
Yakov had been idly rocking back and forth in his favorite chair, eyes closed, listening carefully to all that David had been telling Ari. Now he came back to life, sat up straight, and turned abruptly to Ari. “Stay out of it! The CIA’s being set up. ‘The Nine’ aren’t ETIs.”
“Come on, Yakov,” returned David uneasily, “let’s not get sidetracked onto that demon thing again… okay?”
“You just listen to what I have to say,” returned Yakov impatiently, “and you’ll learn something. I used to practice cabala… heavy occultism… and I’m telling you that ‘the Nine’ are well known in occult circles. They’ve been making contact with spirit mediums in séances for centuries.”
The following Monday, Ari received a response to the letter he had written to Carla. It was enthusiastic and gave promise of further contact.
“How good it was to hear from you,” her letter began. “And how sad I was to have confirmation of Nicole’s death. I saw her name on the list of victims in the news but wasn’t sure whether that was the same person to whom you had introduced me. I tried to phone you at the Sorbonne, and that’s how I learned you’d gone to Israel. They could give me no forwarding address or phone number. So that’s why your letter was such a welcome surprise.
“And how excited I was to learn that you have a newspaper column of your own—and in such a prestigious paper as The Jerusalem Post! Yes, it was a surprise to learn that you were really Jewish, a Holocaust survivor. I guess that makes you very special in Israel. I can understand why, when you discovered your roots, you wanted to live there. It seems strange to call you Professor Ari Thalberg now after knowing you as Professor Hans Mueller all these years, but I’ll get used to it.”
The ground war in the Gulf was over almost before it had begun—in one hundred hours. Was this just a good round figure that appealed to President Bush when he gave the ceasefire order—or was something more involved? His generals in the field had been unhappy at calling off their forces prematurely and thus leaving Saddam, an Arab Hitler, still in power. Why had the decision been made at that exact point?
After raising that question in one of his columns, Ari had then pointed out another side to the story. Bush’s order, which ended Operation Desert Storm at midnight February 27, had made a prophet out of the Lubavitchers’ Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who had predicted an end to the conflict by Purim, beginning on February 28. Was that merely a coincidence?
David showed up promptly at eight o’clock and joined Ari in the living room, sitting next to him in front of the picture window. He wasted no time getting down to business. “There are some bizarre aspects to what I’m going to tell you,” he began, leaning forward and punctuating the tension in his voice by stroking the knuckles of his strong, restless fingers. The lights had just gone on, illuminating the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall, but the magnificent view was lost on these two.
Yakov could be heard rinsing dishes at the sink in the kitchen. “Come on in here!” yelled David, a slight edge of irritation in his voice. “Stop pretending you’re so busy. You’ll be giving advice soon enough—so you might as well get in on the beginning.”
So it was possible to be abducted by PLO terrorists right in the heart of Jerusalem! That alarming experience served as a solemn warning to Ari. Indeed, he had been very lucky. And he was on the PLO hit list because of what he wrote in his column in the Post! No doubt he’d now been moved up a little higher in targeting priority. That was not a comforting thought. How he wished for his old faithful Luger, left behind in France. Any pistol would do, but there was no way the Israeli government would license him to carry a concealed weapon.
The aerial bombardment of Iraq began on January 15, 1991. Ari wasn’t surprised at the uncompromising stand taken by the U.S. President and his coalition partners in their pursuit of Kuwait’s liberation. He was surprised, however, at the overwhelming superiority of American technology, resulting in such astonishingly few allied losses. The allegedly invincible Republican Guard was pinned down and pulverized. Allied air power was making certain that the ground war, once it began, would produce a swift and stunning victory.
Ari was running out of hot issues to write about. Then along came Saddam Hussein’s brutal takeover of Kuwait in August 1990, and Ari’s job as a political columnist became exciting for him once again. The Post had connections high up in the Mossad, which gave Ari access to certain intelligence data that would not expose agent sources and was periodically earmarked for publication in his columns.
