"No," Rebecca said, shaking her head. "And I'm not all that certain I was the only target."
Brandt clenched his jaw. That thought had occurred to him as well. They could have taken Rebecca out at any time. Clearly they had the means. Perhaps not the best intelligence gathering in the world, but the firepower? That they had in spades.
Since he didn't believe in coincidences, Brandt felt that Rebecca was correct. The attack had been triggered by Brandt's arrival. Which chewed at his belly. He had let Rebecca down in so many ways and now to be the source of the danger? His gut would have to wait on punishing them though. He had to first get them out of danger.
"So what were you coming to me for?" Rebecca asked.
Brandt's eyes flashed to Davidson. As much as he wanted to keep the traitor close, did he want him overhearing this conversation?
Rebecca sighed. "Brandt, he might be able to help. For everything that happened..." She stopped, clearly not wanting to detail what that "everything" meant. "Davidson is as fluent in ancient religions as I. And I am assuming that is why you came all the way to London? Certainly this wasn't a social call."
Her tone turned a little bitter at the last. Could he blame her though?
"No," Brandt answered. "I came because a well-known Islamic extremist went all Jewish on me."
Okay, that she wasn't expecting. She cocked her head, trying to understand exactly what Brandt was saying. "You mean a jihadist used Jewish terminology? Not in derision?"
"Not in the least."
Brandt then relayed the exact conversation of Amed, the dying extremist. She sat down at her computer, typing in the phrases the man used. Unfortunately the phrase "the Word" popped up about a gazillion different search entries.
"We need to find out where he stashed the bioweapons like yesterday," Brandt urged.
But the sergeant, of all people, should know solving religious mysteries wasn't a quick process.
"Did you say the weapons were stolen from Russia?" Davidson asked.
Rebecca could feel Brandt's hackles go up. She couldn't find fault with the sergeant though. That's how she felt the first few weeks after she brought Davidson back to London. Everything he said she turned over in her head. Testing, probing, waiting to see if anything Davidson uttered was false or untrue. To date though his pledge had held. The Knot's influence seemed gone.
"Yeah," Brandt finally answered. "On the outskirts of Moscow to be specific."
She met Davidson's eyes. If there was one man who could turn an Islamic extremist into someone who would say "Shalom" as his last word on earth, it was Osip Gershon. But the man, an extremist in his own way, hadn't been heard of in over a decade.
"Want to clue me in?" Brandt asked as the silence stretched on.
"Sorry," Rebecca murmured, pulling up the website for the International Jewish Community of Moscow. The glass-faced building stood tall amongst the Russian capital's skyline. To think within a communist country such a large Jewish complex could exist. It truly was a testament to the fortitude of the Jewish culture. "One of the men instrumental in breaking ground on this center was Osip Gershon, a Jewish scholar."
"So?" Brandt asked, seeming not in the mood for a long hierarchy lesson.
Rebecca switched the screen over to a page regarding a maligned sect of Judaism. "Well, once it was revealed that Osip was a Karaite, he pretty much was scrubbed from any record of the Moscow Jewish community."
Brandt sat down next to her. "You lost me. What is a Karaite Jew?"
"Davidson, do you want to handle that one?" she asked. Brandt seemed none too happy about it, but she had to show Brandt that his old private still had value. That sending Davidson back to America to face trial and then execution for treason wasn't just cruel, it was stupid.
Timidity crept back into Davidson's features. His shoulders slumped and he listed to one side. The verve the man had acquired under stress faded, leaving only the broken, scarred private.
"Well, Sam?" she pressed.
At first he stumbled, his words slurred to the point it was hard to understand them. "Karaites are Jewish scholars who embraced...Wait," he said, clearing his throat. When he didn't follow up, Rebecca went to fill in the silence, but the private held up his hand.
Davidson gulped, trying to push down the thick saliva that threatened to choke out his words. "We need to go back to biblical times." Swallowing, he restarted. "Until the Second Temple was destroyed by Romans, largely the Jewish faith was an oral one. One told through rabbis through the ages with very little to no written word beyond the Torah itself."
He had to take a breath not just to let his punished lungs gather oxygen but for him to regroup. For months Rebecca had tried to convince him not to squander the knowledge the Knot had given him. Instead, she insisted he could somehow right the many wrongs of his past by putting that knowledge to good use. He had not believed it. How could he?
But now standing in front of Brandt? Knowing that Lopez was out scouring the streets for the fastest set of wheels he could get his hands on, Davidson felt a flicker of hope. If there was ever a time for Rebecca's theorem to be put to the test, it was now.
"Once the Second Temple was destroyed, the rabbis had to admit they needed some form of written document to be sent out to the Jewish communities that had been forced from Judea."
Rebecca nodded encouragingly as his voice cracked. He hadn't used it so much since...well, since he was truly a private in the United States Army.
"Let's fast-forward to the eighth century when Islam spread across the Holy Land," she prompted.
"Yes," Davidson answered, "many Jews at the time took to the Arabic philosophy and incorporated it into their own faith."
Brandt frowned though. "Are you saying there are Jewish Islamists?"
"Yes and no," Rebecca answered, typing away at her laptop. Davidson was glad for the distraction. He had all the knowledge in his head, but he was so used to walling it off that his words, already slurred by his disfiguration, just wouldn't come out right.
So much for salvation through oration.
Rebecca could tell Davidson was flagging. No wonder with Brandt's patent-pending death glare boring into him. Luckily she knew exactly where Davidson was taking this.
"The Karaites still held Jewish tenets, however they found the Islamic concept of Mu'tazilah applied to their religion as well."
"Again," Brandt stated, "not quite following."
Scrolling back, Rebecca found the passage she was looking for. "Mu'tazilah allowed philosophers to apply logic and principle to scripture. That even 'perfect' texts could be examined for God's deeper meaning. No word of God was immune to man's inquiry."
Davidson found his voice again. "At first this was applied against the teachings of the rabbis, then spread to the examination of the Torah."
"Okay," Brandt said, "still not getting it. What is so shocking about studying different interpretations of the Bible?"
"Um," Rebecca stalled, knowing how Brandt loved both the Old and the New Testament, "it isn't so much the Karaites studying the Bible as them deciding that the Jewish establishment had been lying to its followers for millennia."
Brandt frowned. The last time they had investigated a religious conspiracy they had barely made it out with their lives. Rebecca and Davidson still bore the secret of that night. She glanced over to the private, whose features seemed heavier than a moment before. The patchwork of scars more purple.
But for all his doubt, Brandt ultimately was the most pragmatic person Rebecca knew. "And you think this Osip and my Amed crossed paths in Moscow."
Rebecca brought up a search of documents containing both Osip's name and the phrase "The Word." While they were over a decade old, it did prove his area of research had honed in upon the concept.
"It's rumored that Osip left Moscow to revive an old shtetl in Pushchino, but it closed down. The only address I can find is in some state housing."
Brandt turned his full attention to her. "Pushchino? Are you certain?"
Rebecca wasn't quite sure why the sergeant was so amped up. Pushchino was a small town just south of Moscow. "Yes. The village had a high Jewish population until Catherine the Great's decree of the Pale that forced mass emigration to western Russia...Why?"
"We believe that the Pushchino biological storehouse is where Amed stole the bioweapons."
The gravity of the situation hit Rebecca. It was all well and good to have theorems and postulating historical relevance. It was quite another to find out your obscure Jewish scholar may have something to do with the theft of weapons of mass destruction.
"What did he steal?" Davidson asked.
CHAPTER 3.
Undisclosed Location, England 9:23 p.m. GMT (Daylight Savings) Brandt pulled up short answering. And not just because it was Davidson asking. There were "need to know" facts and then really, really "need to know" facts. Not even the rest of the team knew the biologicals that Amed had stolen.
"Let me guess," Rebecca said. "Rinderpest."
"How the hell-"
Rebecca pointed to her screen. "Dude, it's right here in a WikiLeaks document. Russia has been accused of hording and weaponizing Rinderpest at Pushchino. And the US knows it because they were doing the same thing in the nineties."
Sometimes Rebecca was a bit too smart for her own good. The other problem? She knew it.
"Plus it makes a great terrorist weapon," Rebecca continued. "Even though the Rinderpest virus doesn't kill people, it kills virtually all the livestock it comes into contact with. So it destroys entire communities, even countries from the inside out. Rioting, starvation, anarchy."
Like he said. Too smart. Although she didn't have all the information. The Russians had supposedly broadened Rinderpest's range of hosts. Modifying the virus to be more like its cousin the measles with the ability to infect humans. Primarily the young and the old.
If anyone infected a country in the Middle East with this? Israel? Syria? World War III would not just be possible but probable.
"So was I close?" Rebecca asked.
"Close enough," Brandt responded.
Rebecca was about to push it when Talli stuck his head in the room. "We've got company."
Brandt stood up, indicating Rebecca and Davidson get behind him. Raising his weapon, he watched Talli and Harvish get into position to aim at the front door. A key clanged in the lock as the doorknob turned.
"Hold your fire," Brandt whispered as the door opened.
A man and a woman walked in, both in pressed suits. The man however wore a grin as an accessory. "Well if it isn't Sergeant Vincent Brandt," the man said in a heavy Scottish accent.
Brandt lowered his weapon. "A good day to you too, Agent Vanderwalt."
The two shook hands until Vanderwalt pulled Brandt into a bear hug. So very un-British-like. Brandt didn't resist though. It was nice to see a trustworthy face in all of this.
Vanderwalt's partner though took out her phone, acting as if she just got a message.
"Put it down," Brandt said. "I'm onto your tricks."
The agent tried to look all innocent as Brandt turned to Talli. "Check for bugs again."
The sensor blinked red over and over again.
Brandt smiled. "Come on. Like M-I-Five is going to give a foreign operative, even an American foreign operative, the credentials to a safe house and not have heavy surveillance?"
"Ah," Vanderwalt breathed out, his hands spread open in defeat. "We had to try."
"Yes," Brandt replied, "yes, you did."
Brandt made sure though that Vanderwalt not only gave the order to the female agent to disable the bugs, but that Talli double-checked that fact. Sure Vanderwalt was trustworthy, yet he was still a British agent. Brandt couldn't fault Walt for doing his job. However, Brandt had his own job to do.
Rebecca watched the two men's bromance reunion with a skeptical eye. She'd never seen Brandt so affectionate with anyone else but her...and supposedly some random chick named Maria, before.
But there Brandt was patting Vanderwalt's back, beaming away. Rebecca hadn't even heard Vanderwalt's name until just now. For a man she thought she knew inside and out, Rebecca had barely scratched the surface of Brandt.
"Dr. Rebecca Monroe?" Vanderwalt asked as he extended a hand in her direction.
Taking the agent's hand, Rebecca shook it. "That would be me."
Vanderwalt's smile revealed a set of crooked yet endearing teeth. "Well, Brandt, there are two bones I must pick with you, chap."
"And those would be?" Brandt asked.
"First, you did not tell me how absolutely lovely a creature your wife-to-be was..."
Heat rose in Rebecca's cheeks. Yet one more person to inform that Brandt and her great sweeping love affair had ended like a used-up firework. Dead and burned out, swept away with the trash. The humiliation never would end, would it?
"Yah," Brandt said, stumbling for the words. "About that-"
"But the second," Vanderwalt continued, "is the fact the American government assured us that the threat of the Knot was over and the Institute was at no risk housing Dr. Monroe," he inclined his head toward Rebecca. "No offense, Doctor."
Rebecca went to answer, but Brandt overrode her. "That's the thing, Walt, it wasn't the Knot."
"Exactly who else but the Knot would bomb Dr. Monroe's office?" the female agent asked, still seeming a bit put off that Brandt had caught her red-handed earlier.
Brandt didn't seem to notice the woman's brusque manner or more than likely didn't care as he explained to the agents that the lab bombed had not been Rebecca's.
"What?" Walt said. "We still have Monroe in laboratory one fifty-eight."
"That was my old lab," Rebecca corrected. "Since I wasn't faculty and they converted one fifty-eight into a student practice lab the Institute never..." Rebecca meant to say "reclassified me," but the words couldn't make it past her suddenly swollen throat.