Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

Rafi reached down to the cooler underneath his table and pulled out a plastic bottle of Neviot spring water and twisted off the cap. He took a long swallow and then another. Peggy wasn't used to the extreme heat of an Israeli summer and that was worrying him, too. He grinned. It was a fundamental part of the Jewish psyche to worry about one thing or another. Presumably Peggy hadn't reached that part of the conversion process yet.

He heard the sound of a vehicle coming down the approach road to the temple site. There was a heavy note to the engine, more like the sound of a truck. Rafi slipped on his old Serengeti Driver sunglasses and stood up. He went to the open end of the tent and stood in the blinding sunlight. He watched as the vehicle came down the winding approach road. It was a Humvee in mottled desert camouflage. The Humvee was Israeli Defense Force.

The squat, boxy, armored all-purpose vehicle pulled up beside the fly tent. It was an M1145 model, the one the U.S. Army was using to replace the original version. Whatever branch of the service it came from they had pull in the motor pool. As far as Rafi knew there weren't more than a handful in the country. During his mandatory stint in the military they were still using Jeeps.

An officer climbed out of the passenger seat and two grunts got out of the back. They were all wearing identical tan uniforms but the officer had three olive branch pips on his green shoulder tabs; a full colonel. The grunts had the triple stripes of staff sergeants on their sleeves. All three were wearing the dark green berets of Military Intelligence Command.

The colonel had a holstered Desert Eagle pistol on his belt; the sergeants both carried futuristic- looking Tavor assault rifles. The colonel approached Rafi. The man looked to be in his late fifties, his square face seamed and lined, the hair at his close-cropped temples grizzled salt and pepper. The two grunts took up positions on either side of him and slightly behind. Their eyes shifted like wolves', always in motion. They were the colonel's bodyguard; whoever he was, the colonel was high on the food chain.

"My name is Abraham Ben- El'azar. I am with IDF Intelligence," said the colonel. "I am looking for Professor Rafi Wanounou."

"That would be me," answered Rafi. "What can I do for you?" he asked, curious.

"It's your wife, Dr. Wanounou. I'm afraid she has been kidnapped."

Peggy Blackstock walked slowly along Mahane Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem, alternately taking photographs and shopping for dinner and anything else that looked good in the shuk Machaneh Yehuda, the city's famous open-air market. She'd already picked up some fresh dates, pistachios and a bag of meat-and-potato-filled "cigars," the Moroccan version of pierogies and one of Rafi's favorites.

Peggy smiled, thinking of her sometimes too serious husband. He'd be out of his mind with worry out there by the Dead Sea if he knew she was shopping alone.

In Rafi's mind she'd changed from the adventurous girl photographer who'd spent two months in the Amazon rain forest with the Matis Indians learning how to use a blowgun and going through the Kampo frog poison ritual-Kampo being the oily sweat of the Amazon monkey frog and a drug that was a combination of methamphetamine and the world's most powerful laxative-all to get her photo story.

Somehow the act of getting pregnant had stripped her of all her toughness and turned her into a delicate flower of womanhood who would wither away if exposed to direct sunlight. On the one hand, it was sweet and romantic; on the other hand, it was a little bit overprotective and claustrophobic, not to mention just plain silly.

Even more worrying to her professorial husband would be the fact that she was shopping alone in the shuk. The shuk Machaneh Yehuda had been the site of three terrorist suicide bombings in two attacks between 1995 and 2002 and still had barrier checkpoints with armed guards at both the Agrippas Street entrance and the entrance at the Jaffa Road end of the market. It was a ridiculous precaution, of course, and basically just for show. The shuk was a rabbit warren of alleys and side streets and anyone who wanted to get into the market unnoticed wouldn't have the slightest trouble.

Peggy wandered through the noisy throng, looking at the tiny shops standing cheek by jowl with each other. A store selling nothing but halvah in different flavors next to a dealer in Judaica, a barbershop beside a backgammon club so crowded that its tables spilled out onto the already crowded street. A discount CD store next to a fancy jewelry boutique. She glanced upward to the second and third floors of the old buildings. She knew from her research that a lot of the apartments and lofts above the shops were now occupied by artists, writers and musicians. The shuk was in transition, going from simply popular to trendy. Greenwich Village in the desert. It was a little sad.

There were two policemen approaching, threading their way easily through the crowd. They were wearing their short-sleeved light blue summer uniforms, at odds with the variety of colorful exotic costumes all around them. One was a plain-faced, middle-aged man, the other a younger woman.

Peggy brought up the Nikon and took a few quick shots. The two cops came to a stop directly in front of her, blocking her path. The crowd broke around them like the current of a river giving way to a boulder in midstream. Shopkeepers paused in the middle of their noisy sales pitches, sensing a bit of drama. Peggy was a little confused; as far as she knew there was no law in Israel against taking pictures of cops. It wasn't as though they were Mossad or anything.

"Peggy Blackstock?" the male cop asked. Peggy noticed that the female had her hand on the holstered butt of the Jericho 915 on her hip. She also noted that neither one of them had any rank insignia.

How the hell do they know my name? Peggy thought.

"Yes," she said.

"I am Pakad Yakov Ben- Haim of the Israeli Police, Headquarters Division."

A pakad-what was such a high- ranking officer like a chief inspector doing wearing a patrolman's uniform?

"What can I do for you, Chief Inspector? I hope you don't mind me taking your picture." The cop ignored the question.

"Please come with us," said Ben-Haim quietly. "It's about your husband. I'm afraid there has been an accident."

Their first sighting of the lonely island was nothing more than a distant smudge on the eastern horizon, balanced on the curving edge of the world, a frighteningly dark mass of clouds in the background, so dark at the spreading base that it was almost black.

"Once we make landfall you're not going to have much time," cautioned Gallant. "A couple of hours at most." The burly lobsterman with the Groucho mustache shook his head. "Any longer than that, you're on your own and I'm gone."

Holliday glanced at Meg, expecting some kind of plea or argument, but she said nothing, simply looking blankly and without expression through the windscreen of the Deryldene D's cabin, staring at the slowly forming smudge on the horizon. Holliday found himself hypnotized by the cold, black, roiling clouds that formed a background to the image of the island. It was like staring at a vision of the future, and the future wasn't good.

They continued east for another hour and a half, the island growing steadily more visible as they approached. Meg had gone below, overcome by her seasickness. At first Sable looked much bigger than it actually was, an illusory desert island shaped in a long crescent, its narrowing arms pointing toward the New World, Arcadia.

Slowly but surely the illusion faded; this was no island of palm trees and beautiful native girls; it was a windswept desolate sandbar, its back to the open sea, its center a spine of wandering dunes barely held together by the tough grasses and bushes that somehow clung to life through the seasons.