The Sixth Station(38)

“Interestingly,” she added, “no one noticed, because at that same exact moment the plane was exploding, that new star that had risen a few days earlier just happened to explode as well. I know for a fact that at least one of them—Father Paulo Jacoby—survived. He’s shown up in the newspapers. Always in the background of some important event. So either he wasn’t on the plane or”—she got up and poured another Scotch—“none of them were.”

“Oh, I see. But let me digress here a second,” I said, wishing like hell she’d offer me a drink. “You mentioned it earlier, and I meant to ask you: What new star? I never read about a new star in my astronomy classes.”

“That’s because it was called a comet. And it was only visible over a small part of the sky, over Ephesus in Turkey. Anyway, it exploded in spectacular fashion. The plane, the star—one big bright mess! The scientists explained that it was the comet’s unexplained emergence that had literally drained energy in the areas it passed over, causing the blackout.”

“Didn’t the astronomers know it was a lie?”

“It was before the real Internet, so rumors didn’t spread at the speed of light … and those that knew, well, let’s just say they either forgot immediately or unfortunately would have met with tragic accidents.”

“So you’re telling me the U.S. or whomever killed astronomers—passive professor types?”

“No.”

“But…”

“No,” she said again, without affect.

A standoff.

“Let me continue,” she said, clearly not willing to go there. “The UN put their professional spokespeople on TV to explain that the explosion of the comet returned things back to seminormal.”

“Semi?”

“That was the year of the wild El Niño winds. They were the strongest and most devastating in centuries. The trade winds unaccountably reversed direction in 1982. It caused disasters on almost every continent. Australia, Africa, and Indonesia suffered droughts, dust storms, and brush fires. Peru’s coastal water temperatures rose by over seven degrees.

“The story of the cause of the international energy drain and subsequent climatic changes was a great cover. And maybe it was true—or maybe it had been caused by a man-made attempt at the ‘Second Coming.’” Wright-Lewis winked conspiratorially.

Oh, please! She was too good a Mata Hari to suddenly forget herself and show her poker face and her hand at the same time.

“Even though the crisis had passed,” she continued, “they wanted proof that we’d done our job. Of course, there was nothing left: The plane had exploded over the ocean. ‘Was the new Jesus on that plane?’ was all they wanted to know.”

“Was He? On the plane I mean?”

She walked to the cabinet again, but instead of looking for more booze, she took out a folder and handed it to me. It was an old CIA dossier, marked “classified.”

I opened it and read: Demiel ben Yusef, approximate age: 11–13, parents unknown/Tel Dan, (aka Tell el-Kadi, Tel el-Kady, Tel/Tell el-Qadi, Antiochia,… Dan): The Biblical City (Israel, Israel), July 1993–1994.

“You—ah, they,” I corrected myself, “knew about this guy as far back as 1994?”

“Yes and no,” she said, not quite answering. “Demiel ben Yusef became a person of interest for the first time in 1994, true. But not for the reason you might suspect. In the early nineties, they—government agencies in the U.S. and Israel—did put the child on their radar. Not because the boy was a danger but because anything out of the ordinary in Israel or in any of its enemy states was immediately made record of—no matter how seemingly unimportant.”

“Why?” I asked, trying to see what any of this had to do with the man on trial. “Were they looking for any signs that this supposed clone baby was alive?”

“Hardly. After the Cold War ended, everyone was scrambling, frankly, to find ways to stay employed and to keep their agencies relevant. This boy made a scene that caused local media attention.”

“But you weren’t with the company any longer, and yet…”

She ignored me completely, continuing, “The boy had showed up at a construction site being prepared for tourists in Tel Dan, in the northern Golan, near the Jordan River. He was bothering the workers and telling them they should dig in different areas. A man, seemingly his father, would come and fetch him away and everyday he’d show back up.

“Then one day, when they were excavating—right where the child had told them to dig—they came across what might be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in Jewish history.”