Storm Front

1
    H is bags were packed and sitting by the door. Nobody thought that was strange, because four diggers were jammed into each small living suite. With two eight-by-ten bedrooms feeding into a tiny sitting and kitchen area, and an even tinier bathroom, there was hardly anyplace to keep clothing, so they kept it in their bags.
    Elijah shared a room with a middle-aged volunteer from Alabama named Steve Phelps. When Elijah’s cell phone vibrated at two o’clock, his first move was to roll up on one shoulder, turn it off, and listen to Phelps breathe.
    Phelps was a sound sleeper, and he was sound asleep now. Elijah often got up to pee at night, and hadn’t awakened anyone doing that for two weeks—the days in the sun were exhausting, and once his roommates were familiar with his night moves, they never twitched.
    When he was sure of Phelps, Elijah rolled out of bed, moving as quietly as he could. He’d loaded all of his personal items—wallet, passport, small cash—into his pants the night before, so all he had to do now was get into them. His socks were already rolled into his shoes, which he would put on outside.
    When he was dressed, he listened again to Phelps, then eased through the door into the sitting area. Here was the tricky part. Another of the diggers, who slept in the adjoining room, had keys to one of the dig cars—and the keys were sitting on a radiator in his room.
    Elijah stepped to the door of the other bedroom, and again, listened for a moment. Both of the men snored, which was why they’d been put together. When he was sure that he could distinguish the separate snoring, he eased open the door (he’d put a dab of Crisco on the hinges the night before, when the others were out) and stepped silently into the room.
    The men continued to snore, which helped cover his movement as he stepped barefooted across the room and picked up the car keys. Two seconds later, he was out of the room; a minute after that, he was outside with his bags, in the cool of the Israeli night, sitting on the steps, tying his shoes, and again, listening and watching.
    It had been an exciting day—maybe somebody else had been restless?
    But nothing moved anywhere on the kibbutz as far as he could tell. He’d been through one tricky part, and now here was the second one. When his shoes were tied, he walked down to the first floor with his bags—a nylon backpack and a leather satchel—and around behind the dormitory to a low wooden building used to sort and classify pottery and other finds at the dig.
    There were no lights inside the building. He reached into his bag, took out a large screwdriver, and pried open the door. Inside, navigating without lights, he went to a row of metal lockers, felt for the fifth handle down, and with the same screwdriver, pried open the locker door.
    A stone sat on the locker shelf. He couldn’t see it, much, but he could feel it, and it was heavy. He put it in his leather satchel, closed the locker door and the outer door.
    —
    A HALF HOUR LATER , Elijah the Mankato-ite sped west in a stolen car past Jezreel, where, roughly 2,850 years earlier, Jezebel the queen had been thrown out a window. Her body had been eaten by dogs—all except for the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet—just as predicted by the other Elijah, the prophet guy.
    As they didn’t say at the time,
Bummer.
    The latter-day Elijah paid no attention to Jezreel, as the former royal city was now just another stony field. Ten minutes later, he rocketed past Armageddon—Megiddo to the locals—where there was no battle going on, penultimate or otherwise. At Megiddo, he turned northwest toward Mount Carmel and the Mediterranean coast at Haifa.
    Elijah was in a hurry: he had to be gone before the diggers got up, and some of them got up very early, at four o’clock. He kept his foot on the floor, and the much-abused Avis rent-a-car groaned with pain. Out the passenger-side window, as he went past Megiddo, he could see the lights of Nazareth twinkling across the farm fields of the Jezreel Valley.
    It was pretty, all right, but he’d been to Israel too often to be impressed. He remembered that first naive astonishment, forty-five years earlier, when he found that the Mount of Olives was full of fake religious sites, that the Sea of Galilee was full of Diet Coke bottles, and that Jesus’ hometown was an Arab city where a good Christian could get his ass kicked if he wasn’t careful.
    Not that he didn’t love the