The Brotherhood Conspiracy (22 page)

They stopped, the bodyguards flanking a flat, unmarked door, nearly invisible along the vast expanse of whitewashed cinder block. Al-Sadr rapped his arthritic knuckles against the wooden door. It swung open and they disappeared into the blackness.

“Now the Israelis will know that we have someone inside.”

Al-Sadr detected a hint of censure in the voice of the commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Two candles on a table burned in the corner of the damp, lower room of the safe house. He closed the distance until his beard nearly came up under the commander’s chin, like a scimitar against his jugular. “You question me, commander?”

Every angle of Youssef’s body was chiseled, hard as granite and with as much compassion. He towered over the stooped shape of Imam al-Sadr. Youssef murdered on order, sent his men on suicide missions without remorse, and had cut the heart out of his cousin who was suspected of being an Israeli spy. This rock shuddered before al-Sadr, as if an earthquake had shaken its foundations. His eyes searched the mud floor for refuge.

“Forgive me, Holy One,” he whispered, his scarred face turned to the ground. “I meant no offense.”

Al-Sadr’s silence hung in the air. He stared at his commander’s supplicant form, then slowly turned away and walked toward the light.

“I do not care if that whore of a traitor is discovered,” al-Sadr said softly. “He has his reason to hate the Zionist pigs, but he would sell his mother as food for the jackals if the price was right, and he would sell us out to the Israelis if it suited his ends. He has been of some service, but he can never be trusted. And there was no choice. Those Israeli commandos had to be stopped. We haven’t finished our search of Mount Nebo . . . though I doubt
anything will be found. No . . . there was no choice. Leonidas must fend for himself.”

Al-Sadr turned from the corner so the candles were at his back. Darkness veiled his face, but not his fire.

“Commander, you will begin infiltrating tonight. Immediately. I want a thousand trained soldiers of the Martyrs’ Brigade under and around the Haram al-Sharif as soon as possible. We must be ahead of the Israelis, ready to strike before they can mount any claim of sovereignty.” Al-Sadr stepped forward. “Who knows what atrocity they are perpetrating upon the sacred stone. No . . . we must restore the Dome of the Rock, rebuild the Al-Aqsa Mosque. You, Commander”—a withered, bony finger rose in the gloom—“will rescue the Haram and save our sacred shrines. Or,” he whispered, “you will all die—on the Mount, or at my hand.”

New York City

The house that George Steinbrenner built, the new one-point-three-billion-dollar Yankee Stadium that opened in 2009 in the Bronx, was one of the most expensive ballpark visits in the nation. Bleacher seats—those in the sun, with no back on the benches—were fourteen bucks. The most expensive seats in the new Yankee museum—the high-backed, faux-leather, blue easy chairs with teak armrests, stretching in an arc close to the field from first base to third base—cost twenty-five hundred dollars for each game. Buyers were required to sign four- to ten-year agreements on the seats to simply acquire the right to pay twenty-five hundred dollars a ticket. When half of those seats remained empty through much of the 2009 season, the Yanks cut the price to only fifteen hundred dollars a ticket.

In the new economy of baseball, two suite seats would cost the normal man a month’s wages. So, in the new economy, five-dollar tickets and the New York Yankees just didn’t compute.

But there they sat, in the upper deck along the first-base line—with a great view of the field and the omnipresent, distracting, five-story high Diamond Vision LED scoreboard—for the livable price of five bucks. The promotion covered about a dozen night games against poor-draw teams—powers like Baltimore, Kansas City, and Seattle. For Joe Rodriguez, who was priced out of his Saturday season package with the move to the new Yankee Stadium, the five-dollar seats were a godsend.

“When I was a little kid,” said Tom Bohannon, who sat next to Joe, “I remember going to Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia and paying fifty cents for a bleacher ticket.”

“Yeah, but that’s when baseball gloves were three-fingered, horses pulled trolley cars, and Edison was still trying to figure out the light bulb, right?”

“Very funny,” said Tom. “But it was a simpler time . . . a better time, I think.”

On this night, in a not-so-better time, it wasn’t the woeful Orioles who were failing to keep Rodriguez’s attention. His mind was a riot of conflicting thoughts and emotions. He felt trapped, a man whose fate was being decided by unknown men in unknown places.

Joe seriously considered just giving away the tickets to the game. But this was one of the few places he knew he could get Tom alone. Yeah, odd to think they could be alone in the midst of a crowd of forty-five thousand Yankee fans. But the strange reality was that—if you preferred and if you kept your voices down—two people could engage in a private conversation in the midst of a great throng. And Joe needed to talk to Tom . . . alone.

“When you were a kid you could buy a new car for less than four thousand dollars,” Rodriguez responded. “A loaf of bread cost a quarter and you walked four miles to school every day . . . in the snow . . . with cardboard in your shoes.”

“Okay . . . okay,” Tom said with a chuckle. “You got me.”

Joe looked at the men on the field, in their white, pinstriped uniforms, and had no comprehension of what was transpiring in the game itself. “Time changes things,” he said, his voice hollow. “Time changes people, too. Not always for the better.”

Somebody got a hit. Bohannon’s eyes were on the field. “Yeah, except for Jeter. He seems to be getting better with age.”

Rodriguez pulled in a long breath, the smell of hot dogs and mustard drifting up through the stands. He turned his head toward Bohannon. “I’m not talking about Jeter.”

When he left high school in Washington Heights, Joe Rodriguez stepped away from the Catholic religion of his Puerto Rican parents. Too much hypocrisy, he thought then. Rules that didn’t make any sense for a modern world. Massive, marble-filled, gold-laden churches that lay empty ninety percent of the week while the neighborhoods around them surrendered to poverty, drugs, and despair. For him, it didn’t add up. So he took his muscular, six-four frame and passion for basketball to Rutgers where he failed to make the traveling team
for two years and walked away from hoops. But he got some scholarship help in return for working part time in the school library. So he took his boundless energy to the stacks and soon found a world he loved more than a layup. The church . . . he left that in the dust of the past.

Four years into his career with the New York City Library, Rodriguez literally ran over a red-haired young woman as he pushed his way into the kitchen during a house party on the Lower East Side. Joe quickly forgot about the beers he had been sent to fetch when he picked the poor girl up from the floor. He was aware that she was attractive. He remembered the cut of her pastel green dress and the cool feel of her creamy white skin. But the image that burned itself into his memory were the swirling sabers of combative fury that burst forth from her deep blue eyes and refracted from her red curls. An imposing man known to have an edge to his New York attitude, Rodriguez had taken a step back in the face of this Irish warrior . . . and knew he had met his match.

Deirdre Bohannon married Joe Rodriguez a year later, but her prayers for Joe started the night of their first meeting. For the last ten years Joe knew of Deirdre’s desire to bring him back to God and her born-again Christian church. He admired her tenacity and was grateful for the respect she showed him by not beating him over the head with her faith. In all those years, Joe never felt the call. Until he witnessed Tom Bohannon’s faith. Now . . . well . . . now he was just confused in his heart. But his mind knew what to do.

“Look, Tom, I know you’re having a tough time. I know you’re taking this thing pretty hard—all the things that seem to have gone wrong since we started on this crazy chase. You take it harder than the rest of us, I think, because you feel responsible. You were the one hearing from God; you were our leader. You had the vision of what we should do next. And we followed that vision . . . all of us.”

“I never asked to lead anyone,” said Tom, trying to keep his eyes on the game.

“Do you know why, Tom?”

“Why what?”

“Do you know why we followed you?”

Rodriguez watched Bohannon’s shoulders sag with resignation as he broke away from the game and stared at the seat-back in front of him.

“Because we believed in you,” Rodriguez said, his voice rippling with a whispered urgency. “We believed in your relationship with God, and with the power of prayer in that relationship. Not all of us have that kind of a relationship—but
we all believed in you and your relationship with God. Why? Because we could see it. We could see it in the way you walked out your faith. When things got tough, you went to God for guidance and support. Not out of some kind of responsibility, but because you were confident God would answer you, help you, guide you. There was a pureness about it. A healthy vitality of faith and spirit that I think all of us were caught up in . . . even Doc and Sammy. We could see your faith, and we all believed because of your faith.”

“I wish I felt about myself the way you feel about me.”

“And that’s my point, Tom,” said Rodriguez. “I do feel that way. I do believe in your faith in God. And I believe that God has faith in you . . . faith that you will stand up for what you know is true, no matter how you feel. Faith in you to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. Faith in you to follow him, no matter what he says or where he asks you to go. I saw it, Tom. I saw it under that mountain. I saw it when all our lives were at risk and one misplaced decision could have been disastrous for all of us. You consistently went to God and God consistently answered you. Do you really think any of us could have missed that?”

“So . . . so what? Everything is changed now.”

“No . . . that’s just it. Not everything has changed. You still have a faith that the rest of us respect and envy, and a faith that God responds to. It’s still in there, no matter how you feel. No matter how much you feel like you’ve failed. It’s still in there. And, you want to know something else?”

Bohannon’s chin was pushed forward, his lower lip pushed up against his top teeth, his lips cemented shut like he was about to be force-fed a hot dog that had lived on the floor beneath their seats since the last home stand. “What?”

“I’m not going to let you lose it.” Joe stretched out his hand and placed it on Tom’s left arm. “Tom, you carried all of us under the Temple Mount. Your faith and your dedication to that faith carried all of us when we should have given up all hope. Now, it’s my turn to carry you . . . I believe in your faith. I believe in your relationship with God . . . shoot . . . I wish I had that kind of relationship with God. Maybe. Someday. But now—now, Tom, I’m not going to let you give up. I’m not going to let you sink under a riptide of self-recrimination and self-pity. We need you—now more than ever. And you need me now. In fact, you need all of us now. And Doc and Sammy are with me on this. We’ve already talked about it. God saved our lives in Jerusalem, in Germany. God watched over our families and kept them safe. Your God, Tom.
Your God who watched over you and walked with you. Now, you doubt. You’re discouraged. You feel despair, thinking you’ve failed. Well, Bohannon, I’ve got something to tell you.”

Tom planted his right elbow on the metal armrest separating their seats and rested his chin in the palm of his right hand. His look confirmed everything Joe feared.

“I’m watching over you now. I’m walking with you. We all are. And, if you need help getting over this responsibility you feel for all the death and destruction—getting through this burden of failure you think you need to carry—then we’re here to help you carry it. And, you know how we’re going to help you? We’re not going to let you forget. We’re not going to let you forget how we prayed and you got the idea for making a raft out of our waterproof sleeping bags. How we prayed and you actually saw the way to find the shaft that led us to the hidden temple. How we prayed and God gave us all the courage to send out the video of what we found to every library in the world . . . a step that led to a real, signed peace between Israel and the Arabs.

“So the peace treaty didn’t last. So what? Do you think, if God had a plan for all that was happening, that his plan suddenly ended with that earthquake? Look, Tom, something else is going on here—or it’s all a continuation of what started when we found that mezuzah in the Bowery Mission.”