The Second Coming by John Dalmas

“I can’t give out particulars like that.”

“Why in the world would I be in the next to top bracket?”

“You’d have to ask Lor Lu, but I presume it’s because what you do is very important, and requires highly unusual skills. After all, Millennium has operations in fourteen countries, with nineteen centers in the U.S. alone. Which doesn’t include Ladder and Hand, of course, or Bailout.”

She lay contemplating what he’d said. “I’m not—I wasn’t—really that well paid after all, was I? Considering my abilities.”

“Well enough, I’d think. Millennium isn’t here to get rich.”

She examined that, too. “What is it here for?”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

Altruism, she thought. A cult could be altruistic, she had no doubt. But one set up like this one? So sophisticated, in important respects so slick, with money appearing out of nowhere? Altruism wasn’t the answer.

So then. What was it there for? Or for whom?

29

Rafi Glickman took a small round table for two, near the back. From there he could see anyone entering. Moishe Baran’s call had given him a case of nerves, but it wouldn’t be apparent to a casual observer. That the deli-cafe was American Jewish was not reassuring. If Baran intended to have him executed, this would be a good location. To the Wrath of God, the execution of a Jew in a place like this did double service. It disposed of an undesirable, and presumably intimidated American Jews who were insufficiently chauvinistic. “False Jews,” Baran called them. Unpatriotic Jews.

Executions were almost always scripted to do double service. According to Baran, to murder someone unobtrusively was wasteful.

Rafi did not suppose that Baran himself would meet him. It would be some “soldier,” someone inconspicuous, whom witnesses would have trouble describing usefully. Someone would either pass him a note beneath the table, or draw a pistol and shoot him through the brain.

He knew the procedure well, though he himself hadn’t killed anyone under those circumstances.

When the person came in, she surprised Rafi; women were seldom assigned to carry out executions. But his trained eye knew she was the one, plain and unmemorable. And an agent, not an operative, because he’d never seen her before.

He did not react. It was as if he’d abandoned himself to death.

She walked over, and with a slight smile, sat down. “Hello, Rafi,” she said quietly. “I have a message for you. They were pleased with your professionalism on Monday.”

A bomb, exploded by a remote triggering device when the place was crowded. It had destroyed a home in the Antelope Valley, the main hangout of the most violent gang of anti-Semitic skinheads in southern California. Eight persons had died; six others had been hospitalized. At one time he’d have felt satisfaction in such an act. A few long years ago.

God forgive me. His thought was a prayer. Rafi wondered if God factored in that he was an anti-terrorist mole, who carried out terrorism only to maintain his cover.

“And they sent me to give you this.” She handed him a piece of paper. Not under the table. He unfolded it and read. It had been typed in Hebrew, on a typewriter, not a computer, which suggested Yeshua Ben David himself as the author.

It began: “Because of your excellent performance of duties, in particular that of last Monday, and your intelligence, training, experience and good judgement, you are hereby promoted.”

There was no signature. It did not say promoted to what. (Nothing in it identified anything or anyone.) He looked at the young woman who’d given it to him. “Thank you,” he said gravely. She nodded, got up and left.

Promotion would be to senior operative, which meant his stipend would be doubled. He’d be expected to leave the job he had—eighteen hours a week as a computer technologist for a Hebrew newspaper—and serve the Mossad full time. His promotion would associate him more closely with the Wrath. He might then get a line on the teams upstate, and in the east and midwest.

And commit more offenses before God.

He put coins on his saucer to pay for his coffee, then left as gray and expressionless as he’d walked in. Like the gray and expressionless Yeshua Ben David, first among equals, whom Rafi feared most of all.

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