The Flaming Sword. Breck England

there will be a breach between us. A breach in the Church.”

      “It’s happened before,” Tyrell waved them away.

      Police Headquarters, Dizengof Street, Tel Aviv, 0630h

      “Apparently they’ve embedded this lattice into a GeMscreen. You can turn it into whatever element you want, even some that have never been heard of before. They have an app that turns the screen into a high-definition hologram projector. Another one turns it into a 99-percent efficient solar cell, so you can set your GeM in the sun for five minutes and not charge it again for years.”

      They were both waiting outside a dingy conference room for Kristall to call for them. Miner was fascinated by the rough sketch Ari was making on a notepad. “And you say it could be made into a weapon?”

      “That’s what Halevy said, but he wasn’t very forthcoming about it. I got an idea he wasn’t sure what to say.”

      “How could he be?” Toad interjected. “If the thing can be turned into any one of an infinite number of elements, he could never know exactly what it was capable of.”

      Ari had explained everything to Miner; Kristall would have known he wouldn’t withhold anything from his team.

      “And now everything points to the Arab… I mean, the ‘Eagle’?” Miner asked.

      “He’s the intersection. The eyelash, the murder scenes. And now we’ve tracked him here.”

      “When did he surface? I thought they lost him yesterday.”

      Ari laughed. “We had a hundred people looking for him from Ramla to the coast. Then the airline rang this morning to tell us ‘our man’ had just booked a flight to Rome on the Internet.”

      “In his own name?”

      “Right. He’s planning to waltz onto an Alitalia flight at 0800 just as cool as you please.”

      “I suppose it’s really him.”

      “Oh, yes. He’s already at the airport—arrived two hours early, like a good customer. Either he doesn’t know that we’re onto him or doesn’t care. Plus, he’s flying business class.”

      Miner was puzzled. “Are we going to let him go?”

      “Yes. Kristall wants me to stay with him. She’s intrigued.”

      “So…any idea why the two vic’s in Tel Aviv?”

      “The woman was involved in patenting the thing… There’s so much at stake here that the killer might have wanted her out of the way, maybe to make it easier to steal the rights. Tempelman…I don’t know. He was shady. Obviously he was involved somehow.”

      “What’s in Rome?”

      “Nobody knows. Maybe Eagle’s going there to hand off that very special GeM to somebody?”

      Miner brightened up. “That makes sense. No better way to smuggle the, um, item out of the country than as a perfectly ordinary GeM.”

      “That’s Kristall’s way of thinking.”

      “So you’ll be on the flight too.”

      “Yes, and I’ve got something for you to do while I’m away.”

      ***

      Toad stood in a corner of the cramped morgue and watched as the examiner measured the gaps between the wounds on the body of Catriel Levine. The long white corpse was punctured once in the forehead and three times in the chest. If the three points were connected, they would form a straight line. The examiner had already measured a similar pattern on the body of Shimon Tempelman, which lay covered on an adjacent table.

      Toad felt cold inside and out. He was used to the role of observer. Sometimes he felt as if he were not arms and legs and head, but just eyes, looking out at a world that he was not spatially a part of. He put no trust in people’s descriptions of things until he saw them himself. Now he saw under the lights the dead body of Catriel Levine and submitted to a reality he had only imagined. For an instant he felt like he was drowning—a sudden burning in his eyes, a contracting throat. She’d been remote, contemptuous; still, it felt like his own life had been lost.

      The examiner covered the body and beamed his data to Toad. All the statistics of Catriel Levine’s mortality poured digitally into his GeM; he stared at the image on the screen and wondered why it had such power over him. He thanked the examiner and left for the briefing.

      He went into a choked little conference room as a group of city police came out, grumbling about Shin Bet. GeM projections played on the walls: Kristall, Ari, and Miner were showing a schematic of the Cohen Brothers offices to a big white-haired man in an elegant suit. Another man Toad did not recognize sat looking desolate in a chair too small for him while two impassive Shin Bet operatives stood behind him.