"You seem to be getting a lot of bad intelligence lately."

"Some bad, some good."

"That Palestinian school? Was that good or bad?"

"Hmm. Taken in isolation, that was a disaster. But you have to understand, there is more to the picture...."

"I saw the part of the picture with the forty-eight dead children. It would take a lot of puppies and rainbows in the rest of the picture to balance that out."

"Christine," Isaakson said quietly. It was the first time he had used her first name. "Christine, I like you. You have a good soul. That is why I'm telling you this, not because you're a reporter, or because you work for Harry Giddings. I feel that you need to know, because I believe in what I'm doing here, and I want you to be able to say, after I'm gone, that I was a brave man who believed in what he was doing. Understand?"

"I do," said Christine, but she suspected that this display had very little to do with his concern for her opinion and very much to do with the fact that she worked for Harry Giddings. Perhaps she was being cynical, but the idea that this battle-hardened general was suddenly opening up to her of his own accord was difficult to swallow.

"We've been getting a lot of intelligence lately," the general said. "I can't tell you the source, but this intelligence, these tips, they seem to come in threes."

"Three tips at a time," Christine repeated, impatient with the game. "About what? Enemy positions? Munitions locations? Getting red wine out of cashmere?"

"Various tactical considerations," Isaakson said. "The thing is, one of the tips is inevitably wrong. As a result of this sort of misinformation and I'm not necessarily saying this is what happened we might end up bombing a school full of children or...."

"Attacking a strategically irrelevant city in southern Syria."

"Hypothetically, although Imtan may yet prove to have some importance," Isaakson said. "In any case, we have no choice because two of the three tips are always correct, and their value outweighs the cost of pursuing the other one."

"'Outweighs?' To whom? Because I think you'd be surprised at the screwed up priorities of Palestinian schoolchildren."

The general's eyes closed. Christine couldn't be certain, but it seemed as if he was struggling to maintain his stolid demeanor. When his eyes opened, they were cold and distant. Was this also part of the performance? "That," he said, "was undeniably a tragedy. I regret having to... I regret doing that. In fact, it's primarily because of that... miscalculation that I have...."

There was another blast, closer than the previous one. Louder shouts this time. Christine could almost make out what the men were saying.

"Are we safe here?" Christine asked.

The general waved his hand vaguely. "These rockets," he said dismissively. "Like children's toys. They go up in the air and fall onto a street, or a house, or a park. The odds of them hitting anything of importance...."

"Less than one in three?"

"Much less."

"It helps when your definition of 'important' doesn't include houses, streets, or parks."

"Relax, Christine. We're safe here. G.o.d is on our side."

"Oh, good," Christine said, trying to strike an even chord between sardonic and relieved. She couldn't tell whether he was being facetious a fact that unnerved her almost as much as than the nearing explosions.

There was a hissing that became a roar.

A puzzled look came over the general's face. It was the closest thing to fear that Christine had seen him express. "Get down," he said calmly, but he did not move except to grab the metallic case and grip it tightly to his chest.

She obeyed without thinking, diving under the cheap table.

The flash was visible even through closed eyes. Then everything went dark.

She regained consciousness seconds or minutes later. She could see little through the cloud of dust and heard only a sound like a constant rushing wind. It was nearly dark despite the late afternoon sun, and she dimly surmised that the building was still largely intact. The smell of burnt masonry filled her nostrils and tickled her throat.

She became aware of someone coughing nearby, trying to speak. It was the general. "Here!" he gasped. "Take this." He was thrusting the case toward her. Blood streamed across the surface of the case and onto her jacket.

"What... what is it?" She stammered.

"Check it with your baggage," he said raspily. "If they ask, tell them it's a laptop computer."

"But what is it?"

Barely visible through the haze, the general appeared to be smiling. "A laptop computer," he said.

Of course it was. Silly.

"Take it..." he said almost inaudibly, "...to Mercury."

The general crumpled into a lump next to her.

Christine lay under the table, covered with dust, her head pounding. She seemed to be otherwise unhurt.

Mercury? she thought. Like, the planet planet? That didn't make much sense. On the other hand, he couldn't possibly mean.... No. He couldn't mean that that Mercury. Christine filed away the request for later processing. Mercury. Christine filed away the request for later processing.

She got slowly to her knees, hitting her head on the underside of the folding table.

"Dammit!" she growled.

As if it had been awaiting her command, the roof collapsed. Timbers split and came crashing down on the table, followed by a shower of tiles and a cascade of bricks. The general was buried under the avalanche.

"Oh G.o.d," Christine whispered.

Impossibly, the table held. Had the beams just happened to fall in such a way as to leave the table intact? she wondered. The odds....

Still, it wouldn't matter. The walls had largely collapsed as well, turning the table's recess into a sarcophagus. If someone came along to dig her out, the shifting weight would most likely buckle the table's thin legs. She imagined she could hear, over the ringing in her ears, the table groaning as it tried to hold the weight of the building. An attempt to call for help resulted in her hacking up dust and gasping for air. She covered her face with her t-shirt, but was unable to stop before she had coughed her throat raw. Well, she thought. I probably won't try that again for a spell.

She considered tapping on the nearest table leg with a chunk of brick in the hopes that someone might hear the sound, but couldn't bring herself to do it, fearing that the slightest touch would bring the roof crashing down upon her.

Christine had always expected her death to be ironic. Prior to taking refuge from an avalanche of cinder blocks under a folding table on the Israeli/Syrian border, she had often imagined being nibbled to death by rabid squirrels while on the way to a PETA rally, or having a ma.s.sive coronary while playing Hearts in the cardiac ward of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart hospital on Valentine's Day. She vaguely suspected that the only reason she was still alive now was that the Universe was waiting to finish her off until it had come up with a better punch line.

She didn't pretend to know much about the Universe, but one thing she knew was that it had a pretty good sense of humor. She was also pretty certain that she was something of a favorite target for the Universe's new material. Death by folding table was a decent gag, she thought, but not really worthy of the Universe. Better than slipping to one's death on a banana peel, but not by much. She definitely preferred some of the Universe's earlier work.

She tried to distance herself from her circ.u.mstances and imagine how funny it would be to a far-off observer perhaps an elderly gentleman in Akron, Ohio fifty years from now if she were to tap on the table leg in hopes of drawing attention to her plight, only to cause the table to collapse, delivering a load of three thousand pounds of bricks crashing down upon a plucky brunette with green eyes and $180 in unpaid parking tickets in Glendale. Still not really Universe material, she thought. But then maybe she just didn't get it.

The air was becoming muggy but the dust refused to settle, and between the lack of oxygen and the increasing pain in her head, she was finding it more and more difficult to make sense of the Universe's setup. It was difficult to remember, in fact, whether she wanted her situation to be funny or not, and who the gentleman in Akron was, and why he wasn't helping her out with this whole deal rather than just sitting there staring at her and wondering if maybe there wasn't something better on Pay-Per-View.

While all of these semi-coherent notions bobbed about her head, she noticed movement through cracks in the rubble. It was a person, clawing toward her, clearing the rubble, it seemed, with his or her bare hands. Blindingly bright light streamed through the dusty air. The figure was a silhouette in reverse, sunlight streaming through its elegant frame.

Strange, she thought, her impeccable sense of direction still functioning even as she slipped back into unconsciousness, the sun isn't ordinarily to the north.

SEVEN.

We angels tend to derive a sense of meaning from our place in the Heavenly bureaucracy. Mortals, who come into the world devoid of that sort of explicit guidance, are not so fortunate. As a result, many of them spend a good deal of time and energy looking for some sort of meaning in their existence.

With humans as with angels, meaning meaning is generally a.s.sumed to be synonymous with is generally a.s.sumed to be synonymous with order order, as if one could imbue one's life with meaning by discovering some secret plan that governs one's existence. People inclined toward this sort of thinking often claim not to believe in coincidences. What they actually mean, however, is that they believe in a principle often referred to as synchronicity synchronicity the idea that events which appear to be causally independent are, in fact, connected in some deeper way. the idea that events which appear to be causally independent are, in fact, connected in some deeper way.

Only one man of note has gone on record as literally disbelieving in coincidences. That man was St. Culain the Indifferent, who taught that no two events ever occurred at precisely the same time. St. Culain also theorized that time was divided into discrete particles called chrotons, which were roughly the duration of three ten thousandths of the span of one of the pope's sneezes. This latter embellishment was thought to be a concession to the Church, which had threatened to immolate Culain for the heretical a.s.sertion that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit rotated shifts as G.o.d[6].

Culain was dismissed by his contemporaries, and he one-upped them by refusing to acknowledge their existence. His lifetime saw the disintegration of the last bastions of the Roman Empire, the rise of the papacy and the birth of Islam, none of which particularly impressed Culain. He died in 646 A.D. when he choked on a chunk of salted pork while ruminating on Zeno's paradox. His grave marker bears the inscription Panton in suus vicis Panton in suus vicis, or "Everything in its time."

Culain's ideas garnered renewed appreciation by the inventors of early mechanical computing machines, and on December 31, 1899 he was canonized as the result of a software glitch at the Vatican.

Christine Temetri had never heard of St. Culain the Indifferent, but she was about to experience the sort of absurdly unlikely string of events that he would have appreciated. Observe: Christine awoke in what appeared to be a hospital bed. The clock on the nightstand next to the bed said 5:36 PM. The oversized gown she was wearing read Property of Tel Aviv Medical Center. Property of Tel Aviv Medical Center. An oxygen mask was strapped to her face. An oxygen mask was strapped to her face.

She pulled off the mask, brushing a cloud of dust from her hair in the process. Her throat was dry and scratchy and her eyes burned, but other than a few minor scratches and bruises, she seemed to be uninjured.

Her escape from the collapsed house was the sort of event that even secular journalists tended to describe as "miraculous." Christine, having a firmer grasp on the precise meaning of that word than most secular journalists, however, reserved judgment. She had to admit, though, that she was amazed to be alive.

Isaakson, she had to a.s.sume, was not so lucky. He must be dead, crushed to death under the weight of broken cinder blocks and timbers. She wasn't sure how to feel about this. It was, of course, horrific to see another human being die like that. On the other hand, that sort of death wasn't entirely unexpected for someone in Isaakson's position. He had been, she supposed, one of the good guys to the extent that there were any good guys in this sort of conflict but how many deaths had he himself caused? Would his death in fact save lives? Or would it cause the Israelis to retaliate brutally, escalating the conflict even further? She wished she understood the politics of the situation better. Fights over land and national sovereignty she could understand, but the players in this war seemed to be acting out a script that had been handed down to them, without sufficient direction, from prior generations. And then there were people like Harry, who seemed to be pulling strings from somewhere off-stage.

The war itself had been an exercise in fateful escalation, each side reacting predictably to the real or perceived offenses of the other. It began when a group of Palestinian teenagers, reacting to a recent crackdown on demonstrations in the West Bank, had started pelting Israeli soldiers with rocks. A lucky shot knocked a soldier unconscious, and in a desperate attempt to rescue their fallen comrade, the Israelis opened fire, killing several of the teens. One of the Palestinians, a ten year old boy, had been carrying a makeshift cane or a sword, depending on the source fashioned from a branch of a nearby tree, which happened to be of the species Olea europaea Olea europaea. This imparted the otherwise inconsequential skirmish with symbolic significance and led to a series of escalations resulting ultimately in the outbreak of the Olive Branch War.

As she pondered these things, a nurse opened the door to her room.

"Oh, good, you're awake," said the nurse, a solidly built matronly-looking woman. "I was starting to get concerned." Her English was good, although it slouched uncomfortably toward Yiddish.

"I think I'm alright," said Christine. "Just a little banged up. And of course I inhaled a lot of "

"We're running out of rooms," clarified the nurse. "There's a war going on, you know."

Christine wasn't sure what to make of this. Was she being accused of deliberately occupying a room that could have been given to someone more deserving? "Yes," she responded flatly. "I was in it."

"Mmm," said the nurse. "If you could clear out by six, that would be very helpful."

"Really," insisted Christine, feeling that she wasn't getting due consideration for the ordeal she had just been through. "The house I was in was. .h.i.t by a rocket. I was with...." It occurred to her that it was probably inadvisable to say more. Her meeting with Isaakson was supposed to have been a secret.

"So you were spelunking in a house then?" asked the woman.

"Spelunking?" said Christine. "Why would you...?"

"This was pinned to your jacket," the nurse said, handing Christine a crumpled piece of paper. It read, in neatly handwritten block letters: SPELUNKING ACCIDENT.

"We had to look up 'spelunking,'" explained the nurse. "We thought it might be something, you know, kinky kinky."

Christine stared at the note uncomprehendingly. "Hang on," she said. "You mean you just found found me here? You didn't see anyone drop me off?" me here? You didn't see anyone drop me off?"

The nurse shook her head. "The admissions nurse just looked up and there you were in the waiting room, with SPELUNKING ACCIDENT pinned to your shirt. There didn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with you, but we couldn't wake you up. Figured you were just tired from a hard night of spelunking. So we cleaned you up a bit and gave you some oxygen. Anyways, like I said, it would be helpful if you could check out at the front desk before six."

The nurse continued to stand there, smiling disingenuously at Christine, as if she expected her to clear out that very second.

Christine smiled back. "It's not six o'clock yet," she said, and picked up the remote control for the television.

The nurse sighed disgustedly and trudged off.

Christine turned on the television, flipping through the channels to find some kind of report on what had happened with Isaakson. Every four or five clicks she would land on a news report of some kind, but the top story of the day seemed to be the release of the latest book in the Charlie Nyx series. She couldn't fathom what would prompt scores of people to dress up as wizards and goblins and camp outside a bookstore for three days for a silly children's fantasy book, but there they were, in London, New York, even places like Minneapolis, where one would think people had more sense. It was surreal that mere miles from the epicenter of the war, people were more concerned with a fictional teen warlock than with the mounting toll of the fighting. And just when she thought the reports had exhausted everything that could possibly be said about a book which no one had yet read, there were the obligatory shots of religious fanatics protesting the book's release in Nashville, Houston, even places like Denver, where one would think people would have more sense.

Christine alternated between flipping rapidly through the channels in an attempt to land by chance on an actual report on the war, and waiting out the fluff on a given channel in the hopes that eventually they would have no choice but to report some actual news. The results of both strategies proved disappointing.

Eventually she settled for a channel that showed a young Frenchman in a flack jacket standing amongst some sort of ruins and yammering mellifluously into a microphone about something that one could only a.s.sume was happening just over his right shoulder. He was not at all unpleasant to watch. He reminded Christine of a younger, French-er Peter Gabriel. Unfortunately, Christine was disappointed to find that she could understand virtually nothing of what the flack-jacketed, Peter Gabriel-esque man was saying.

She had no good reason to think she might understand him; her misguided hope rested on the scant French she had learned during the single semester she spent as a French major in college. She had gotten two thirds of the way through French 101 before despairing of p.r.o.nouncing French vowels correctly and deciding that if she ever traveled to France, she could just as well be mocked for not speaking the language as for speaking the language through her nose. She had abruptly switched her major to English and, as a result, could only be certain that the young French Peter Gabriel was not hailing a taxi or ordering fois gras fois gras.

As if the torrent of vowels and soft consonants pouring from the reporter's mouth weren't enough for Christine to decipher, French words also began to scroll across the bottom of the screen. Every third word was familiar to her, but she didn't have time to piece them together before they scrolled off the screen. It was like being in the reception line at a college roommate's wedding. She gathered, after several feverish minutes of deduction, that there was some sort of war going on.

What she did not not see or hear was any reference to the death of General Isaakson. If the clock on the nightstand was to be believed, she had been out for over four hours. Long enough for the news media to have found out about Isaakson. Even the see or hear was any reference to the death of General Isaakson. If the clock on the nightstand was to be believed, she had been out for over four hours. Long enough for the news media to have found out about Isaakson. Even the French French news media. news media.

Had Isaakson made it out alive? That seemed very unlikely. She had seen him crushed under a ma.s.sive pile of concrete. At the very least, he was very badly injured. Something like that would have made the news.

The sound of her cell phone's ring broke the melodious stream of meaningless syllables emanating from the television. Christine found it in her purse beside the bed. The display read "Harry."

She pressed a b.u.t.ton and grunted into the phone.

"Christine?" said Harry. "Are you okay? I got a call from a hospital in Tel Aviv. Who is that with you?"

"n.o.body. French reporter on TV."

"You speak French? What's he saying?"

"Je ne se qua," Christine said, pressing MUTE MUTE on the remote control. The reporter, whom Christine had begun to think of as on the remote control. The reporter, whom Christine had begun to think of as Pierre Gabrielle Pierre Gabrielle, continued to motion energetically over his shoulder, as if he were juggling. Christine wondered if the MUTE MUTE b.u.t.ton on French remote controls was labeled b.u.t.ton on French remote controls was labeled MIME MIME.

"So you're okay?" asked Harry.

"Considering that I recently inhaled about half a house, yes," said Christine.

"They told me what happened," Harry said. More quietly, he added, "Isaakson's people."

"So Isaakson is d "

"Shh!" Harry whispered. "They're keeping it under wraps for now. At least until they've a.s.sessed the damage. They don't want to embolden the Syrians."

"But we're going to report it," said Christine, trying to avoid making her statement into a question. "We have have to report it." to report it."

"We will," said Harry. "Soon. The Israelis just need a chance to get a handle on things. This sort of event can act as a catalyst, provoking more violence. We need to make sure "