Prince of Fire

Chiara was asleep. She stirred as he climbed into bed, but did not wake. When he pressed his lips against her bare shoulder, she murmured incoherently and rolled away from him. He looked at his nightstand. The papers were gone.

35

T EL M EGIDDO , I SRAEL
    N EXT MORNING G ABRIEL WENT TO A RMAGEDDON .
    He left his Skoda in the parking lot of the visitors center and hiked up the footpath to the top of the mount through the searing sunlight. He paused for a moment to gaze out across the Jezreel Valley. For Gabriel the valley was the place of his birth, but biblical scholars and those obsessed by endtime prophesies believed it would be the setting for the apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Regardless of what calamity might lay ahead, Tel Megiddo had already witnessed much bloodshed. Located at the crossroads between Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, it had been the site of dozens of major battles over the millennia. Assyrians, Israelites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders—all had shed blood beneath this hillock. Napolean defeated the Ottomans there in 1799, and a little more than a century later General Allenby of the British army defeated them again.
    The soil on the top of the hill was cut by a labyrinth of trenches and pits. Tel Megiddo had been under intermittent archaeological excavation for more than a century. So far, researchers had discovered evidence that the city atop the mount had been destroyed and rebuilt some twenty-five times. A dig was under way at the moment. From one of the trenches came the sound of English spoken with an American accent. Gabriel walked over and looked down. Two American college students, a boy and a girl, were hunched over something in the soil. Bones, thought Gabriel, but he couldn’t be sure.
    “I’m looking for Professor Lavon.”
    “He’s working in K this morning.” It was the girl who’d spoken to him.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “The excavation trenches are laid out in a grid pattern. Each plot is lettered. That way we can chart the location of every artifact. You’re standing next to F. See the sign? Professor Lavon is working in K. ”
    Gabriel made his way over to the pit marked K and looked down. At the bottom of the trench, two meters below the surface, crouched an elfin figure wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. He was scratching at the hard subsoil with a small pick and appeared thoroughly engrossed in his work, but then he usually did.
    “Find anything interesting, Eli?”
    The picking stopped. The figure looked over his shoulder.
    “Just a few pieces of broken pottery,” he said. “How about you?”
    Gabriel reached down into the trench. Eli Lavon took hold of Gabriel’s hand and pulled himself out.
    T HEY SAT IN the shade of a blue tarpaulin and drank mineral water at a folding table. Gabriel, his eyes on the valley below, asked Lavon what he was doing at Tel Megiddo.
    “There’s a popular school of archaeological thought these days called biblical minimalism. The minimalists believe, among other things, that King Solomon was a mythical figure, something of a Jewish King Arthur. We’re trying to prove them wrong.”
    “Did he exist?”
    “Of course,” said Lavon, “and he built a city right here at Megiddo.”
    Lavon removed his floppy hat and used it to beat the gray-brown dust from his khaki trousers. As usual he seemed to be wearing all of his clothing at once—three shirts, by Gabriel’s count, with a red cotton handkerchief knotted at his throat. His sparse, unkempt gray hair moved in the faint breeze. He pushed a stray lock from his forehead and appraised Gabriel with a pair of quick brown eyes.
    “Isn’t it a little soon for you to be up here in this heat?”
    The last time Gabriel had seen Lavon, he’d been lying in a hospital bed in the Hadassah Medical Center.
    “I’m only a volunteer. I work for a few hours in the early morning. My doctor says it’s good therapy.” Lavon sipped his mineral water. “Besides, I find this place provides a valuable lesson in humility.”
    “What’s that?”
    “People come and go from this place, Gabriel. Our ancestors ruled it briefly a very long time ago. Now we rule it again. But one day we’ll be gone, too. The only question is how long will we be here this time, and what will we leave behind for men like me to unearth in the future? I hope it’s something more than the footprint of a Separation Fence.”
    “I’m not ready