“So what? You saw Dr. Talcott? You talked with her?”

“You have to help me.” Nate was trying to catch his breath. “And then we have to get out of here fast. Where’re the keys?”

Handalman handed them over, eyeing the cart. “I don’t have to give blood, I hope?”

Nate opened the trunk. “Help me get Jill into the car.”

The rabbi made a gesture with his hands, And that makes sense how?

Nate motioned, hardly able to believe it himself. “She’s in the cart.”

Jill woke up to find herself lying on an itchy sofa in a stranger’s living room with Nate hovering over her. She blinked up at him from behind a fuzzy headache. There was a smell in her nostrils like rubbing alcohol.

“Are you all right?” Nate asked. Over his shoulder peeked the face of a man with slicked-back brown hair, a yarmulke, and an enormous beard.

Jill sat up. Her head throbbed as she moved, but when she sat still and put her head in her hands, the pain went away. “What’s going on?”

“Someone tried to kidnap you from the hospital.”

“The Mossad,” said the stranger, with a slight accent.

Jill raised her head, moving it ver-r-ry slowly, to give Nate a look.

“It could have been the Mossad,” Nate agreed. “Or some other foreigners. I’m not sure what language they were speaking, but it sure as hell wasn’t English—or Greek, either, for that matter.”

“What. Are. You. Talking about?”

“The lab guy, the one who came to draw your blood. He must have drugged you. He put you in his cart and…”

A story followed, one that hit the limits of her imagination and then sailed over like a fly ball. Jill gingerly moved her head as Nate talked, rolling it on her neck. But the pain seemed to be gone and the smell in her nostrils was fading. Funnily enough, the last thing she remembered was the lab tech sticking a needle in her arm.

She looked around sharply. The only windows were small and high and overlooked the bottom of a fence. They were in a basement apartment. “Nate, where are we?”

“A friend of mine’s place.”

The bearded man passed her a glass of water. She took a sip. It was all coming back.

Was there really another government onto the one-minus-one? It wasn’t possible… was it?

She felt a thrill, shoved the glass at Nate, and stood up. “We have to go back to the hospital. Nate, I can’t believe you did this! What were you thinking stealing me like that? What am I, a sack of potatoes? What will they think!”

“Jill,” Nate said quietly, “will you sit down and listen, please?”

The other guy, the stranger, was watching them both, eyes intelligent and patronizing as hell. Jill couldn’t for the life of her see how some third party fit into all this, particularly not a Jewish third party. What was he doing sitting there listening to her and Nate’s private conversation? Was he the owner of the house or what?

She sank down slowly, because the look on Nate’s face was hard to refuse and because her legs didn’t want to hold her up anyway. She had to admit that part of her was secretly relieved to be out of Lieutenant Farris’s grasp, even though that didn’t make sense. She would have to think this through carefully.

“Jill, this is Rabbi Aharon Handalman.”

The man studied her warily, as if she were dangerous. “I wish I could say it was nice to meet you. But I have the feeling none of us has much to be glad about at the moment.”

12.2. Aharon Handalman

Aharon had been in worse places. The apartment Nate had brought them to was in the basement of a large old home in a residential neighborhood. The apartment, Aharon could tell right away, was trayf, not kosher, probably not even Jewish. He touched nothing. He longed for a cup of tea.

He brought out his briefcase and his heavy binder. The woman, the scientist, kept eyeing him with distaste, as if he were lugging samples, like maybe he was going to sell her new carpeting or life insurance. He knew what it was—he was a religious. Nothing he had to say was anything she wanted to hear. To be honest, he felt the same. But his curiosity, his desire to know more about the weapon, went a long way toward making peace.

He arranged his things on a coffee table the size of a small car and opened the code binder. To prepare himself he closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer over the Scripture. He felt, as he had been feeling lately, like the words had changed into a language he didn’t understand. When he opened his eyes, Dr. Talcott was making a face.

“What is this?” she asked Nate. “You don’t want me talking to the government, yet you get mixed up with some religious cult?”

“Judaism,” Aharon said curtly, “has not been a religious cult for three or four thousand years.”

“I ran into Rabbi Handalman at your place.”

“My place?”

“I was looking for you,” Aharon said.

“Just hear him out, please.”

The woman settled back reluctantly and looked at Aharon with a dull challenge in her eyes. As if he couldn’t handle that. As if he hadn’t run into a hundred like her at the Aish HaTorah seminars, people who refuse to believe anything.

“I teach yeshiva in Jerusalem and I study Torah code.”

The woman groaned.

“You know something about Torah code?”

“Only that it’s silly, and it’s been thoroughly disproved.”

A flame of irritation burned in his stomach, but Aharon only made a “we’ll see” gesture. “Odd that your name should turn up in it then.” He turned the binder to a marked page. “I found your name in a group of arrays I’ve been studying about a man named Yosef Kobinski.”

“Kobinski was a Polish physicist,” Nate explained. “He wrote a manuscript before he died during the Holocaust. The Mossad is looking for it.”

The boy glanced at Aharon for confirmation. Aharon nodded. Go on. He’d seen something in Dr. Talcott’s face change when the word physicist was mentioned.

“Rabbi Handalman showed me some of Kobinski’s work. It has mathematical notations in it that—well, it looks to me like he might have been on to your equation.”

The woman’s forehead knotted with skepticism. “But that’s… The Holocaust was sixty years ago. That’s just not possible!”

“Kobinski was a genius,” Aharon told her.

“And you got this from Bible code? Really, Nate!”

The boy gave Aharon an apologetic look. “I think you need to see this for yourself. Rabbi?”

On the plane ride over here, thank god, he had thought to copy out the meaningful keywords in English, anticipating just such an encounter. He pushed the list across the coffee table to Dr. Talcott. She leaned forward reluctantly. One fingernail went into her mouth to be chewed as she scanned the list. Her other hand worked at the nub of the sofa. The woman had so much bottled up it could only come out through her hands, Aharon thought.

kobinski—400

auschwitz—200

quantum physics—30

weapon—200

law of good and evil—8

heaven—40

hell—40

equation—26

weapon of obliteration—5

from him the weapon—3

book of torment—30

weapon of torment—5

weapon of terror—4

weapon of evil—4

the great weapon—5

demons—20

weapon loosing demons—4

angels—20

weapon loosing angels—4

Talcott—40

Dr. Jill Talcott—25

If he was not mistaken, he saw a flush of fear on that freckled little face. But—typical!—she went into denial immediately.

“This is ridiculous! Nate, we don’t know who this man is or what he’s trying to do. What if he’s the Mossad? What if there is no Mossad in all this? Who’s to say this list of words isn’t completely fabricated?”