The Tapez Scroll: Remnant Rescue, #1

By Michael Vetter

Underwater scientists and adventurers, Jake Cohen and Angie Cherubini, trace clues in an ancient crumbling scroll to find the Ark of the Covenant somewhere deep in the Red Sea. Pax Romana forces and two Kingdom's navies are on their heels hoping to grab the priceless centerpiece of Judaism. The first half of the Tribulation is almost over and the Antichrist's diabolical plan to exterminate all Jews is in place. The two adventurers have no intention of letting the Antichrist use the Ark of God for his blasphemous stand in Jerusalem's Third Temple.

Angie's billionaire father backs the couple's daring rescue mission into the heart of the Persian Kingdom where they confound the Antichrist's False Prophet known as Islam's anticipated Al-Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam. The rescue team's daring deception and escape from downtown Teheran in a cloaked jet stretches the imagination of stunned onlookers.

Motivated by fierce bravery and zeal, followers of the Messiah risk all for the salvation of their Jewish brethren. As husband and wife, Jake and Angie pledge to spend their inherited fortune and their earthly lives to rescue a remnant of Jews from the greatest Holocaust the world has ever seen. A shadowy resistance force is born—they call themselves Remnant Rescue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Vetter
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386193326

Michael Vetter

Michael Vetter is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer with degrees in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Lowell and Ocean Engineering from MIT. The Tapez Scroll—Remnant Rescue Series | Book 1 is his fifth book of fictional adventure that melds speculative technologies with Biblical themes. Michael and his wife Mary live in Salem, New Hampshire. Contact him at [e-mail]

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Chapter 1

Spain, Near the Strait of Gibraltar—Salvage Vessel Quintus

During the Tribulation

The metallic reverberation over the satellite link sounded worse when Hafez Sai’id shouted. His impatient voice rose an octave and echoed in my headset.

Jake! Are you there? Can you hear me?

Mr. Sai’id, please don’t shout. I hear you just fine. I’m very busy right now. What is it?

I was hunched in front of a bank of displays in the control room of the decrepit Quintus salvage ship approaching the end of my eight-hour shift and at the same time monitoring three underwater robots that used blue-green lasers to create a high-resolution map of the sunken hull of the Maersk Horizon container ship. When I finished setting the transponder field around the sunken super-max ship, which rested on the bottom intact, it could be refloated and refurbished for much less cost than building a new ship. If I had one robot in the water, I’d be able to leave the control room for a quick snack and let the autonomous mapping drones finish their job without supervision, but this time I had to keep an eye on multiple mappers to make sure they didn’t cross over into a swarm of larger drones dismembering another sunken hull nearby. The last thing I wanted was for my precious little mapping drones to be sliced into pieces by brute-force choppers.

Big grappler robots would ferry any intact shipping containers from the second hulk’s opened belly to a mother ship floating less than a mile away. When they were finished removing salvageable containers, the chopper drones would methodically cut the irreparable hulk into pieces to be recovered tomorrow by a foundry barge. The call from Mr. Sai’id was an unwelcomed intrusion into my already tense multitasking in front of a wall of video displays.

"Jake, are you finished surveying the Maersk Horizon yet?" He didn’t waste time with chit chat. He got right to the point.

The transponder field will be finished later tonight, Mr. Sai’id. I’ll upload the map to the recovery ship in the morning. When I’ve made sure that the map transferred correctly to its autonomous robots, then I’ll leave. You remember what happened in Prospect Bay when it recovered the wrong ship and we ended up losing an entire recovery drone swarm, and—

Forget what you are doing, Jake, Sai’id said. "I am sending you instructions for an urgent job authorized by Principe Constantine himself. You will follow your new statement of work to the letter!" He shouted for emphasis and the ringing on the link punctuated his terse command.

I knew Sai’id well enough to not expect much further explanation, although mentioning the most powerful dictator in the world grabbed my attention. I knew I wouldn’t like the instructions that Sai’id issued next.

"You will cease all mapping operations at this moment and take your Quintus ship to the port in Majorca at maximum speed. The Maersk Horizon is now on the list to be cut up."

But that ship sank intact. I’ve surveyed the entire hull and it could be refurbished and put into service in less than a year. Why cut it into pieces?

Sai’id plowed ahead as if he didn’t hear me. I will pay off your ship’s contract crew in Majorca. You must take the next flight to Madrid and then to Jerusalem. Your plane ticket is ready for you at the airport. You will be compensated for your work in most generous terms.

"What about the Scout and my other drones?" I wasn’t about to leave my valuable equipment behind. My cutter and recovery drones were programmable and multifunctional; they’d be useful for any type of search and salvage job. On top of that, Scout was the most advanced autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) in the world and the only reason I had a job.

I’d been in the Azores doing post-doctoral work over an ancient shipwreck with the Scout’s hyper-sensors when the North American War broke out and destroyed much of civilization on that continent, including the oceanographic institution that owned the Scout. After the wars that destroyed one quarter of the world’s population, a powerful military commander defended Israel from northern and eastern attackers, conquered countries to the west and south of her, and proclaimed peace in the Promised Land for all Jews. The title of Prince of Rome, or Principe, was added to the new world leader’s list of titles who had fashioned himself after the Roman Emperor Constantine. He divided the planet into ten subservient regions or kingdoms. Every private company and its assets became property of the new world order centered in Rome. The confiscation was a brilliant move to stimulate economic recovery and to everyone’s surprise, it worked. At least I had my job. My assignments came from Mr. Hafez Sai’id, a bureaucrat in the Economic Ministry’s Precious Metals Recovery Office. A vast central planning hierarchy in Rome kept me and the Scout busy replenishing the economy with metals. The Imperium, as the Roman imperial state was called, would never be satisfied until it controlled every aspect of human life on the planet. My small role in the global machinery created by the Principe was to locate and survey millions of tons of shipping sunk in the Mediterranean. Identifying recoverable commercial cargo, and recycling expensive, high-strength steel from ships’ hulls was a high-priority for the world ruler’s economy.

"Leave the Scout and your other equipment with an Imperium representative in Malaga. They will be transferred by military aircraft to your next job," he said.

Military aircraft? Now that was something new. Sai’id must have some serious authority for this project if he had access to Imperium military air transportation. I agree on one condition: my assistant, Benjamin Haaretz, must escort the equipment or the deal’s off. I had very little leverage on this with my sponsor, but it was worth a try. Ben was my undergraduate assistant when we were stranded in the Canary Islands after the Disappearance, or what Christians call the Rapture. He was the best drone programmer I’d ever met; he was also my best friend since everyone else close to me was gone. I knew I’d never see my unique equipment again if he didn’t escort it every step of the way.

There was a brief hesitation and then a terse, Approved. The satellite’s high-pitched static told me that the Syrian bureaucrat had hung up.

In spite of being hassled from time to time by my Imperium sponsor, I liked my work. I’d leased the Quintus, a rusty, medium-sized salvage vessel, hired a reliable crew, and used the ship as a base for my AUV, worker drones, and underwater sensors. I enjoyed the technical challenges of living at sea, finding sunken ships, and seeing them come to the surface—albeit in pieces most of the time. So far, my little salvage operation had been insulated from power politics between Rome and the kingdoms and the large-scale naval maneuvers that had the rest of the world tied in knots. True, I had to work on a contract for a detestable, totalitarian ruler, but then anybody who wanted a paying job these days worked for his people. Besides that, we had no choice but to accept our pay in virtual currency. Regardless of the fancy terms used by the Imperium, everyone called the global digital money virts. I’d never get rich bouncing from job to job around the Mediterranean being paid in virts, but I was doing undersea exploration which was my passion. I loved the search and discovery part of it. I was more than happy to let other companies do the dirty work of harvesting metals or recovering live military ammunition. Programming robots to find and map sunken ships was much safer.

While I kept my eye on the wall of video monitors in front of me that showed a dozen robots scurrying about below, I had to wonder what Sai’id was up to by dropping the Supreme Ruler’s name to get me on a plane to Jerusalem. Why did Sai’id want me to fly to Jerusalem anyway, of all places? I wasn’t aware of any salvage opportunities near Israel. During the past year I’d been Sai’id’s top go-to guy for the most difficult ocean search and mapping jobs, especially where ships were broken open and valuable cargo was scattered over the ocean bottom. My personal relationship with him was curt and testy. The peace treaty with Israel a little more than two years ago didn’t change the fact that I was Jewish and Sai’id was a Shi’ite Muslim. There was always tension between us. He worked for what used to be the European Union and was now called the Europa Kingdom within the global Imperium or sometimes called the Principium so we didn’t forget that it was the Principe who was in charge. I had no doubt that Sai’id’s personal allegiance rested with the Kingdom of Greater Persian which its subjects called the Caliphate of the Twelfth Imam. I tolerated my sponsor’s rude manners without caring too much which geographical kingdom he was affiliated with. As long as he paid me and my crew for our recovery work I was willing to put up with a lot.

I finished marking the grid around the Maersk Horizon wreckage and sent the coordinates and a hyper-sensor map of the ocean bottom over the satellite link to the Josef Azaamov robotic tender that was 300 kilometers away and enroute to my location. The autonomous tender was a robotic recycling factory of gigantic proportions run by a complex web of artificial intelligence. When it arrived over the wreck tomorrow and before the sunken ship’s exterior hull was cut open, tiny video and assaying robots would open the hatches and catalog the visual features and locations of all the cargo inside. In this case, the Maersk Horizon was manifested to have carried aluminum aircraft parts. After linking the features and locations of the metal cargo to the waiting scavengers, the scavengers would gather the parts and send them to lifters on the Josef Azaamov to be cleaned or recycled. The process repeated itself automatically until the hull was empty and only non-metallic or small pieces of debris were left inside the hull. Then the mother ship would release two dozen untethered cutting drones to dissect the steel hull into house-size chunks that lifters carried to the surface ship where arms fed them onto a conveyor. From there, they were taken to the nuclear powered furnace to be melted into ingots. When the sunken ship was completely recovered, intelligent vision robots picked up the grid transponders from the seafloor and returned them to the tender. The Josef Azaamov would finish its salvage work within 72 hours after arrival and be ready to either offload its cargo of parts or continue to the next recovery site to gather more.

The Imperium had harnessed undersea robotic technologies to achieve one of its goals of revitalizing world commerce for shipping and raw materials—something that was not possible in the internally fractured, competitive economic world of the old European Union. Now that Constantine was head of the Revived Roman Empire, everything had changed.

I flicked on the ship-wide public address speaker. My assistant wouldn’t like this. Hey Ben, can you come to the control room and relieve me? You’ll have to recover all the robots right away. Let the helo pilot know that I need to fly to Malaga.

Chapter 2

Italy, Off the Coast of Bianco—Vespucci Mini-sub

So little sunlight reached a depth of 500 meters in the otherwise pristine Mediterranean Sea that two bright xenon lights on the Vespucci mini-submersible cast sharp beams on the sandy seafloor illuminating neat rows of pottery jars. The research vessel (R/V) Marco Polo hovered on the surface in brilliant sunshine. The sub’s pilot was the first human being to set eyes on this ancient Greek cargo ship since it settled to the bottom more than two thousand years ago. A marine archeologist with a doctorate from the Fabbini Marine Archeological Institute in Naples, Angie Johanssen, was excavating ancient wrecks off the coast of Italy for artifacts to display in a new museum in Rome. She wasn’t doing it for the money—her father’s company owned the research ship and submersible—but these days if work wasn’t done for the Imperium then they’d confiscate the artifacts anyway. So she conducted deep water archeology for the one-world government.

The catastrophic natural upheavals in the earth’s crust that erupted after the Rapture had uncovered buried shipwrecks along the coast of Italy and raised the ocean floor so that they could be found and recovered with minimal investment. While some European cities along the Atlantic coastline were obliterated by tsunamis, the Mediterranean shores were altered but with little loss of human life. The southern shore of Italy—the sole of the Italian boot—had uplifted enough that Sicily and the mainland were now connected at Mesina; Northern Africa was only 20 kilometers away from Italy; the eastern Mediterranean was accessible through the new, narrow Strait of Tunis. Angie had been exploring the new shallow inlets and bays of Italy for shipwrecks where a stark, rocky coastline existed before.

The bright beams of the Vespucci illuminated hundreds of amphora nestled together in a row on the sandy floor next to the decayed outline of what had once been a large wooden cargo ship. The sturdy carrier had plied the eastern Mediterranean between Italy, Alexandria, Greece and Asia Minor, hauling bulk cargo for its wealthy owners. In all likelihood, it sank in a storm while trying to find a safe harbor. Unearthed from the ship’s dark grave, brightly colored jars looked as pristine as they did the day they sank. Angie wanted to recover as many of them as possible before the earth shifted again.

She took satisfaction in maneuvering the Vespucci with a light touch of the dual hand controls to pick up an amphora with a titanium claw and gently place it on a storage rack. After closing the wire mesh cover of the rack to keep the jar from falling out, she looked for another artifact whose paint almost glowed in the xenon beams of the sub.

A blinking red light on the far side of the control console caught her peripheral vision. The Marco Polo was calling her from the surface. She’d forgotten that she had muted the intercom. She put her headset on and flipped a switch to activate underwater communications (UWC).

What’s up Sammy? she said to Captain Samuel Goldman.

I wondered when you would answer. We’ve been trying to reach you for the past half hour. Is there a problem?

No problem. I forgot that I had the UWC on mute, that’s all. What’s the rush? She knew that the weather topside was ideal—light wind and calm seas—and the Marco Polo’s crew took their time working on a list of minor repairs and maintenance. It was forecasted to be a quiet day at sea.

Mr. Sai’id has been trying to reach you. He sounded frantic.

Doesn’t he always sound frantic? Probably needs a signature on some official form or something. Can you patch me through on the Satcom link?

I have him on speed-dial. Here goes. Samuel Goldman was so efficient that Angie didn’t know what she’d do without him. The stocky, crewcut captain was a former Israeli Navy commander, expert mariner, and her good friend. Her father hired him to captain the Marco Polo research vessel after the war. Goldman welcomed the additional duty of looking after the owner’s daughter. He was like a protective brother that she could count on for anything.

Several clicks and one ring tone later she had her sponsor on the line. Mr. Sai’id, how may I help you?

Oh, Mrs. Johanssen I am so glad that you returned my call. I have been worried sick for you. Are you alright? Has there been a problem with your ship or your submersible? She turned the volume down on her intercom headset.

None whatever, Mr. Sai’id. I’m sure the captain has told you that all is well here. She knew that Sai’id disliked speaking at any length with Sammy, who is Jewish. Her sponsor doubted the truth of information from him unless it was confirmed by her. I apologize if you thought I was ignoring you. What can I do for you?

I have a change in your project direct from Principe Constantine that requires you to move your ship to Haifa and yourself to fly tomorrow to Jerusalem. I trust that will be possible. She could hear his controlled breathing on the other end as he waited for her answer.

I could make the trip next week after we recover some amphorae from a ship that we just found off Bianco. Would that work?

His tone turned insistent. "That would not do at all. The command from my superior is clear. You must be on a plane to arrive in Jerusalem tomorrow night because Principe Constantine, he’d never used the supreme authority’s name twice in one conversation before, has himself ordered that you attend a meeting in the Old City the following morning. He paused for his instructions to sink in. Do I make myself clear, Mrs. Johanssen?"

Angie allowed a long uncomfortable pause before she replied. I understand.

Excellent! Your flight leaves Rome for Jerusalem tomorrow at noon. The ticket will be waiting for you at the airport. I have also arranged hotel reservations for you and for a driver to meet you at the Tel Aviv airport. Before she could ask any further questions like what the meeting was about or how he expected her to get from her ship off the coast of southern Italy to the Rome airport in time, he hung up. Official confirmation of his orders would come over the printer before she left if they weren’t on their way already.

She hated it when Sai’id sprung new travel plans on her at the last minute and assumed she would figure out how to comply. There was only one way to be in Rome by tomorrow morning. She’d fly the ship’s helicopter over the mountains, refuel a couple of times enroute and arrive in Rome in time for the noon flight to Jerusalem. After her meeting, she’d treat herself to a few nights in her family’s suite at the five-star King Solomon Hotel in the Holy City. It would give Mr. Sai’id fits when he saw her expense report.

Somewhere Over the Apennines Mountains

Angie enjoyed flying her father’s modified Finmeccanica/Cherubini XFC-1000 helicopter on long distance flights. Tonight she flew the sleek, red craft herself so her regular pilot could sleep. He’d have to turn around and fly back to catch the ship which by now was heading east toward Haifa. An experienced ex-Italian Air Force aviator with more than 5,000 cockpit hours in every helicopter type in the military’s inventory, the regular pilot was asleep by the time they lifted off from the Marco Polo’s helo deck. Pinpoint lights from other air traffic moved across the dark sky in the distance, but were of little concern to her. The helicopter’s high resolution mapping radar that looked down on the rugged terrain below was ready to signal an alarm if she flew too close to mountain peaks. All the automatic features in the XFC freed Angie’s brain to mull over the curveball that Mr. Sai’id had thrown at her.

The helo’s responsiveness was so light to the touch that her subconscious flew it by hand most of the time rather than use the autopilot. The machine had plenty of power to rise over the high Calabrian Apennines on the way to her first refueling stop at the small Gioia Tauro airport. Sammy had called ahead so they were expecting her. They would top off the extended range tanks as soon as she touched down. The second leg followed the coast up to Salerno for another refueling stop and then on to Rome which would put her at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport just after dawn. The throttles of the XFC’s twin turbine engines were set at the higher level of the helo’s cruising speed and it purred through the night. When she arrived in Rome she would catch a shower and a few hours of sleep in the airport hotel. Sammy had upgraded her to First Class on the flight to Jerusalem and paid the difference with her personal virt card. As mountain villages twinkled below and the instrument panel bathed the cockpit in dim green light, she had time to speculate what the Principe had planned for her in Jerusalem. If the Antichrist himself was involved, then it wouldn’t be good. She touched the Satcom display and dialed her father’s phone number.

Chapter 3

Italy, Rome— Pax Romana Palace, Office of Principe Constantine

Your Greatness, you asked to be informed of any new messages regarding a secret expedition project. I have two updates for you. The office felt like a sauna and the smell of sulphur nearly made her gag. The young shift worker on duty that night in the communications center had orders to print all messages containing certain names and delete their electronic trail from the database. This was strange because the world leader consumed vast amounts of digital information at all hours and almost never used paper. But that’s what her supervisor told her to do. She held the one-page printout of the file that she’d erased minutes earlier. The sweat beaded on her face and a rivulet trickled down her back between her shoulders.

The dark figure reached for the paper without looking up from the interactive screen that formed the glass surface of his large desk. She placed the paper in his hand and his index finger grazed hers. The touch felt like ice. Her reflexive recoil from the cold touch and dreadful feeling of evil that ran up her arm made her vow to never enter his office again.

The man known to the world as simply the Principe was unlike any other human being on earth. He was a handsome physical specimen, a political genius, a brilliant military commander, and a religious uniter, all in one perfect body. As an orator he could move crowds to tears, whip them into a frenzy of nationalistic pride, or drive them into rages of righteous fury, all in the span of a few minutes. His simple, logical explanation of the mysterious disappearance that rocked the world brought comfort and hope to millions in suffering and despair. Some claimed that he was a man sent by God for a world engulfed natural disasters, war, disease, famine, chaos, and death.

Billions of citizens were in awe of the man who first came to international notice in Turkey as Constantine VII, Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of Constantinople. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace between Turkish Christians and Muslims. He achieved this with a scientific DNA test proving that he descended from both the original Emperor Constantine and the Ninth Imam, Ali ibn Musa. Even when the DNA data was later shown to be falsified, Christians and Muslims still found common ground in their enthusiastic support for this unique man. Riding a wave of national popularity, he was elected President of Turkey in a landslide. At his inauguration, he pronounced an end to centuries of religious and ethnic animosity.

At a ceremony for a second Nobel Prize a year later, Constantine claimed the title of The Awaited One, come to pave the way for Mohammed ibn Hasan, or the Twelfth Imam. Muslims focused their devotion and energy on their anticipated Savior and welcomed Constantine’s rapid ascent to power. When the world’s stage was set, a Twelfth Imam did appear and swore his followers’ allegiance to Constantine. Rome, Jerusalem, and Babylon took a final step toward forming one world religion.

After unifying the world’s major religions, Constantine demonstrated his skill as a military leader by leading a coalition force of a million soldiers to defend the Holy Land, sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, from godless Russia and its hungry allies who threatened to invade the region’s precious oil fields and annihilate everyone in the Holy Land. Following a string of supernaturally spectacular military victories in this holy war, Constantine dedicated his life on the world stage to eliminating all war and promised permanent peace on earth. International leaders gave him a free hand to build a common bridge between warring nations and opposing religions. The world pined for a powerful leader who would bring peace to humanity in suffering, pain and confusion.

His string of political and military successes was breathtaking. Constantine claimed credit for bringing about what he called the Pax Romana after wars and natural catastrophes left a quarter of the earth’s population dead and modern civilization’s economic engine in hopeless disarray. His smooth public diplomacy masked his army’s ruthless methods and, after rescuing Israel, he re-organized the remaining nations into ten loose confederacies under his supreme leadership. Confederacy leaders swore allegiance to him and agreed to all of his terms in return for semi-autonomous rule over their kingdoms. The result was central control of a world government that managed its functions through one information and financial network located in Babylon. It was no coincidence that Babylon, the new economic center of the world, was within the Persian Kingdom also known as the Caliphate. Every individual on the planet was connected by a digital link to the Babylon Network.

In a gesture of false humility, Constantine first refused the lofty titles and honors heaped upon him by Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Protestant religious leaders. Western leaders gave him the Roman title, Pontifex Maximus, or Highest Bridge Builder. His rapid ascendancy to power was attributed to divine favor, and thus people believed every pronouncement from his lips to be infallible. He explained worldwide catastrophes, celestial signs, and other mysterious phenomena in articulate speeches that reached to every corner of the world. Whatever he said became accepted fact when social media and news coverage from Babylon repeated it. Any suggestions by fringe, fundamentalist religious sects that the wars and catastrophes were God’s judgment on mankind were dismissed by him as a false conspiracy called the Judgment Myth Narrative. Natural catastrophes, he said, were the result of mankind’s selfish sins against Mother Nature’s care and benevolence. Citizens trusted him because he held the solution to all of their problems.

Constantine called his world alliance the Imperium Romanum because he desired a new government on earth—better than that of Caesar Augustus or the enlightened Emperor Diocletian. He located his office in Rome in the Vatican complex where the Pope became his advisor. Privately, he held grander ambitions in mind but those could wait for other pieces of his master plan to fall into place.

The intense figure who hunched over his desk in the dark turned his attention to the secret expedition and skimmed the paper in his hand. The two technical experts were on their way to Jerusalem to meet the head of the Third Temple Foundation tomorrow. Ships were underway and the expedition would begin in a few weeks. If all went well, they would return with the lost Ark of the Covenant and he would put it in its rightful place in his Temple in Jerusalem. When it was in the center of the Temple—the Holy of Holies—his ultimate goal for humankind would be realized. None of the pawns in this game could imagine what was in store for them after that. It was better that they not know.

He had a timetable in mind but he’d wait for events to unfold. There were a thousand pieces in motion, but he was confident that each would come together when the time was right. Besides, a supernatural force inside him assured that nothing could disrupt a plan conceived more than ten millennia ago.

He listened to the inner voice that assured him. The Evil One had energized his every thought and deed since he surrendered to him.

Chapter 4

Israel, Tel Aviv—Ben Gurion International Airport

The evening flight from Madrid to Tel Aviv was packed with Jewish immigrants taking advantage of the peace accord that opened borders around the world for them to move to the land of Israel. The efficient world economy made food and housing affordable and immigration easier so that Jews could live near the new Third Temple. The magnificent First Temple was finished by King Solomon in 941 B.C. and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Second Temple, a less imposing structure compared to its predecessor, was built under the supervision of Zerubbabel in 516 B.C. by Jews returning from Babylonian captivity. Now, thousands of Jews have returned to Israel every day to live closer to their center of worship.

When I stepped off of the plane into the busy terminal with my backpack slung over my shoulder and pulling one carry-on bag, I noticed a different atmosphere from the first time I was in Israel as a teenager to live on a summer kibbutz. Though my father had accompanied me then, I’d been frightened by the Uzi-toting soldiers, bomb-sniffing dogs, and plainclothes policemen working in pairs and eyeing potential terrorists with suspicious looks. Suicide attacks with bombs, guns, and knives were commonplace in Israel back then. No place was safe before the worldwide Disappearance. My first exposure to the stark reality of life in Israel showed me that Newton, Massachusetts was very isolated from the day-to-day hatred of Jews that permeated the Middle East. In the United States, a hundred might died in isolated terror attacks every year and yet people’s busy lives went on as if nothing had happened—after all, we were reminded by our political leaders, more people died falling off ladders than were killed by terrorists. Israel’s enemies, encircling the small country only a few kilometers away, threatened violent destruction every day. By the end of my first summer on the kibbutz I realized that Israel, unlike the country of my birth, was a land whose sacred principles of righteousness and patriotic fervor were worth dying for. Like the young Israelis I lived with that summer, I resolved that I would become an Israeli citizen and join the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as soon as I turned twenty-one. My parents dissuaded me from that idea. I promised them that I’d wait until after I finished college; my passion for the State of Israel never diminished. The loss of my parents in what Christians called the Rapture, and then the North American War, changed everything before I could join the IDF. Had I joined the IDF when I was twenty-one, my life would have taken a different turn.

Today, the busy Tel Aviv airport looked like any other modern airport in a prosperous European city. The Pax Romana meant that heavily armed soldiers and sharp-eyed uniformed police were no longer necessary. Smart surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavioral analysis algorithms had replaced the police. Artificial intelligence picked possible suspects out of the tens of thousands of passengers who passed through the airport each day. Polite men and women in blazers with the Imperium badges were tipped off by a central computer through their earpieces to take certain individuals aside and question them. Israel was the main beneficiary of the peace that brought ten world kingdoms together under one supreme leader. New security laws meant that a moving walkway whisked hundreds of us at one time from our plane on a remote concourse to the main terminal without passing through customs or immigration checkpoints. There were no money exchangers in the airport clamoring for business because there was one virtual world currency managed by a central computer in Babylon. There was still an underground market for devalued paper currency and gold coins that could purchase anything without leaving a trail. The instant that I stepped off the moving sidewalk, a computer had matched my face with the photo stored on my passport chip and linked my arrival flight to my hotel reservation. A text message with my photo was sent to the driver of the car waiting to pick me up. A computer somewhere tracked my every move without my being aware of it.

The moving sidewalk passed a food court whose enticing aromas reminded me that I’d refused a meal served on the plane. That aspect of air travel hadn’t improved under the new world government. When the walkway split in two directions at an intersection, I stepped off to buy a Coke and a falafel. A swipe of my phone at the kiosk paid for it in digital virt currency before I jumped back on the moving belt going to the Arrivals area where supposedly a car and driver waited for me. I wanted to get to my hotel, take a shower, and fall into bed.

A short, chubby young man hardly out of his teens waited in the hired car waiting area. He made eye contact with me and held up an electronic display with Dr. Cohen illuminated on it. He obviously recognized me from my passport photo which underscored how efficient the new world had become. I gulped down the rest of my drink and threw the cup and empty falafel wrapper into the nearest trash bin. The thought crossed my mind that there was probably a surveillance camera algorithm somewhere waiting to charge me with littering if the drink spilled on the spotless floor or the wrapper missed the trash can.

The greeting tablet in the driver’s hands also showed the name Mrs. Johanssen in block letters. I walked up to the young man and introduced himself.

I’m Dr. Cohen, I said, giving him a slight wave.

Welcome to Israel, sir. My name is Noah and I’ll be taking you to your hotel.

The driver’s age was difficult to judge because of his rotund shape, dark looks, and ill-fitting black suit. Close up, Noah might be eighteen years old. His face beamed with a welcoming smile.

We must wait for Mrs. Johanssen whose plane has just landed. It will only be ten minutes or so. I hope you don’t mind. His English was excellent.

I didn’t realize that there would be two of us going to the hotel. Do you work for Mr. Sai’id?

Yes, Doctor. I work for Mr. Hafez Sai’id. Again, I apologize for making you wait. It was hard to be impatient with someone like this fellow who smiled so much.

That’s okay. I’ll wait over here and see if I can spot ‘Mrs. Johanssen.’ I noticed a matronly woman walking toward the taxi stand looking at the floor in front of her. I wondered if she could be Noah’s other rider. There were very few women traveling alone at this hour of night so it shouldn’t be hard to pick her out.

When I heard Noah sigh Ahh… from across the hallway, I remembered that he had her photo on his phone too. The only woman walking in our direction was expensively dressed, in her late-twenties, medium height with long black hair, and the long-legged, slim figure of a fashion model. She’s probably an Italian actress or supermodel here to vacation on the beaches of Tel Aviv, I thought. With those dark eyes and olive skin, she certainly wasn’t Scandinavian.

Welcome to Israel, Mrs. Johanssen. My name is Noah and I’ll be taking you to your hotel.

I blinked in disbelief that this stunning woman was his other passenger. I walked behind the two of them to the hired car lot. Before we reached his car, we had to negotiate across four lanes of traffic at a crosswalk. She said something to him that made him to halt at the curb and