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Writing Sample /Fiction

Come to Dust — by Mark Sullivan

(Gaza)

Reynolds had been driving for almost two hours through the coastal plains when he saw
strange patches of dark in the sky, whirling upwards on the wind. It was midday and black
columns of smoke from burning tires rose above him, a filter through which the sunlight labored.
The land and sky looked ill, as if afflicted by some horrible disease. Like Kuwait, when he had
walked through the oil fields there after the wells had been set aflame.

A while later, whiter dust clouds appeared from explosions as the Israelis destroyed the
tunnels the PLO had dug as escape routes. He choked on his anger as he navigated the car along
the bad road. This endless scarring of the Earth pissed him off to no end.
Human waste was on the same scale. He had watched some of the ISIL beheadings, though
to him they were paltry and sensational compared to the millions of children in the region whose
lives had been ruined by war.

He focused his attention out the car window. The smoke got denser as he drove onward
through the dying landscape, and then fences appeared, strung with razor wire at the top.

Israeli soldiers and others – the U.N. troops being the most prevalent of the foreign elements present-
patrolled the makeshift borders. Farther ahead a sudden profusion of hedgehog barricades appeared.

A Swedish cadre passed him at high speed in a military vehicle along the highway.
Before long he reached an IDF checkpoint at Jabalia town, which was no more than a pile of
sandbags along the road with machine guns mounted on every side. Reynolds flashed his
American passport. “I’m here to visit a friend.”

“You Americans are running out of friends,” the young IDF soldier said cynically. “Got a
cigarette?”

Reynolds was tempted to say something about Israel’s even shorter list of friends, but
instead reached into his pocket and handed him a cigarette. The kid with the gun nodded his head
and waved Reynolds through. Just a reminder of who was in charge.

His heart sank a little, as it always did, upon entering the place. Jabalia Town was a
collection of shallow buildings made from mud bricks, concrete and corrugated iron, and there
were occasional small marketplaces around which the women gathered with their wide-eyed

children. A spirit of deprivation filled the air that felt to him like a permanent condition. He saw
few people in the streets.

“Prayer is better than sleep” are the words cried out by the muezzins each dawn in all
Moslem cities and villages. But the Palestinians would probably be far better off asleep, Reynolds
thought, without sarcasm.

In truth, for as much pity as he could afford, given his job, he pitied these people. The Gaza
was an example of the genuine degradation of a people who could not – due to a change in world
politics — be eliminated en masse as the Jews had been by the Nazis. So they were herded into
these nauseating places and kept together like animals. In the land of mystical abstractions and
almighty covenants, the Gaza corrected the whole picture for Reynolds. This was just another
goddamn war. Or, more accurately, there was no war, only the gradual elimination of a people
whose time had come by another people possessing more might. The land belongs to those who can
defend it. Not that the Palestinians wouldn’t do the same to the Israelis if they ever got the upper
hand; or to each other, inside their own tribal divisions, if the Israelis were gone. But probably not
in his lifetime.

What the hell, he thought, at the highest levels it was all moving fast towards cyber-warfare now.

The machines were taking over. God wanted us to make the perfect computer that would
eliminate us. In fact, Stephen Hawking had once explained computers boded ill for
humanity: we would make one that would take over, not from ‘malice’ but merely because we
would get in the way of its goals. We would be like the ant hills unfortunately located at the site of
a new hydro-damn going in. It was like training your replacement before you got fired, adding
insult to injury.

And in the years since 9/11, America had become an electronic prison.
Reynolds continued down the patch of local dirt road until he came around a curve. He
moaned, overwhelmed for a moment like a person who has just discovered rotten meat in their
stew. The wretched dwellings suddenly multiplied beyond belief and now spread out in a massive
ghetto that appeared endless. At one point he passed a small crowd surrounding an Israeli soldier.
Men, women and children were yelling and whining in unison, breaking down their prey with the
persistence of professional beggars. From his car window Reynolds saw the young Jew’s eyes. No
more than twenty years old, the kid looked frightened.

Reynolds saw the familiar makeshift mosque on a corner, made a turn and drove until the
Mediterranean Sea appeared in one sudden bold stroke. As if by a miracle, it put an abrupt end to
the degradation in the way that only Nature can.

Just before a triple set of razor wire fences running before the beach sat a lone, single-story concrete house facing the sea. On the other side of the fence near it was a boat on a mooring. This was Yavi Habibi’s place, paid for by his
favors to Mossad and American intelligence.

Reynolds opened the car door and got out. Habibi was always there. He never went out
except in secret and on very rare occasions, and this was his cover. The other occupant of the
house, an old Egyptian woman posing as a Palestinian, came and went freely.

Reynolds knocked on the door.
The woman answered and let him in, walking him solemnly and in silence to a door that led
to the deep basement. Habibi was waiting for him midway up the stairs, a fat, well-fed man crowned with a
shock of black hair and inquisitive blue eyes. “Reynolds! Come in, man.”

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(Jerusalem)

Ariel moved quickly among throngs of people, most of them no taller than his shoulders. With
deft, fluid movements he made his way through the swarming crowd and before long he arrived in
the Armenian quarter. Soon he was moving up the Expatriarchate road and past the parliament
buildings. He stood for a few moments in front of an official looking facade, looked around, then
turned and entered the building through a large double doorway. The security guards nodded him
past and he took an elevator to the top floor. Netzer was not expecting him, and perhaps he should
have called first. But once Ariel entered the office, Netzer’s secretary informed him that her boss
was out in the field and would not be back that day.

“Please, where is he?”

“Hebron, at least until tomorrow evening.”

“Tell him I was asking for him, would you?”

“Of course.”

“My love, I’ll need a computer.”

“Take the one in the back room, Ariel.” She smiled.

He made his way to the rear of the office and entered a small windowless room filled with
computers and other communications devices. The machines hummed in unison like a chorus of
aliens.

Only a handful of people in Israel had access to the secure sites he was about to search. All
messages were erased immediately from the local servers, after first being encrypted and then
relayed, in a split second passage, to the island of Malta in the Mediterranean where the data was
stored remotely.

Sitting at a workstation, he logged on with an I.D. number and password issued to him by
Mossad, and was soon checking their secure sites for recent information on artifacts discovered in
the region. One bulletin board in particular was dedicated to an exchange of this type of
information. He found nothing — no mention at all of the relics. So far, so good.
He recalled Gad had said that a friend test the relics at Hebrew University, using carbon 14
dating procedures — tests that put the samples at 2000 years old. This information, he discovered, was listed on a Mossad database, and also on another run by the IAA. It was noted on both that
the test data had been deleted less than an hour after being entered. Mossad, the IAA, and several
other agencies routinely monitored the university servers, just as weathermen watch the sky.

As he read through a series of related and unrelated bulletins, something caught his eye
and made him catch his breath. He stared for a moment at the information, checked its source,
and then groaned aloud, cursing the bad luck. He had hoped for just a little more time, but no
such luck. Reynolds, the American spy, had entered Israel by Ben Gurion airport several days ago.
His arrival would indicate a likely complicity with Rome, and the Vatican had long arms. Long
horns was more like it. Most likely they were aware of the relics — though just how much Ariel
could not say– and had requested American assistance. Their own resources were formidable
enough, dangerous enough to make him fear for his nephew’s safety.

He sat for a few minutes in silence, thinking over what to do. Gad wasn’t a kid anymore; he
was an experienced soldier who had been through many trials by fire. He had killed to stay alive.
How in God’s name had it come to this — that of all the young soldiers in Israel the relics ended up
in his nephew’s hands? The heaviness of the situation oppressed him.

He calculated what could be done. There were just a few options, and part of his analysis
relied on guesswork, since he was not sure exactly how much the Americans and the Vatican, or
even the Arabs, knew. But the arrival of Reynolds was ominous. He turned in his chair, cudgeling
his brain to find a way to turn this threat into an advantage. An idea came to him, crystalized in
his mind. It had the quality of inner light. He shook his head, smiling.

He picked up the phone and called an old friend, a curator at one of the local important
museums. He fired a battery of questions at him, all the while begging him not to inquire too
deeply. Then, “Just tell me you can do it — okay? Good, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Arrange a
vehicle for me. Thank you, my friend. Many thanks,” he said.

Ariel hung up and then switched off the workstation PC and studied his hands, full of
calluses from digging out in the desert for many years. The drama and the absurdity of it all hit
him in odd moments like now. The stories the otherwise dry and barren earth yielded in this
region were endless. Here as nowhere else the past held an exaggerated importance; the relentless
adherence to a collective story, the need to impose special meaning on an often cruel existence.

This desperate search for meaning practically defined Israel. Everyone wanted death and
suffering to mean something very special.

But here the search rarely took place in the present; or, rather, it was always in the present
and nobody could see this. All that mattered was what was written long ago and must be examined
in minute detail; words recovered from the dusty desert.

God be praised, he thought, laughing. Now his nephew had become involved. By some
strange trick of fate they were together in an operation. Maybe it was not so bad after all. If he
must learn the truth of the world, then better to get it all in one quick dose. If only Gad survived.
It was the big players that made relics a dangerous game, or sometimes the uninvited, rogue
speculator willing to risk all for a chance at the money these artifacts could bring. The world had
gotten dirtier, if that was possible; and information, now moving at the speed of electricity, had
become harder to conceal. Special skills had levelled the new field more. Anyone could dominate
the matrix — a schoolboy in Slovakia or in China, or a professional at NSA — if they could get
inside and pull it off.

Ariel’s mind raced down other passageways, remembering his own youth and the feelings
he had once experienced as a young archeologist. There had been a time in his life when he had
seen these ancient relics as evidence that God was deeply personal, aware of who we are, watching
us, listening to each one of us, hearing our cries in the dark and deciding how He would intervene.
Ariel shifted in his chair, remembering the beautiful face of Clara Shaham, a girl he had
been with thirty-five years ago. Her tears of joy had mixed with his own as they held one another
at a gravesite they’d unearthed in the Sinai — not yet knowing anything about the identity of the
remains, but ecstatic just to have found them. He laughed as he remembered how they had made
love on the mound of dirt they had dug up, returning to Jerusalem that night, filthy, full of wonder
and excitement. Well, their lovemaking had been long overdue, he recalled, sighing.

He tried to fight back the self-critical reaction that always followed these memories from
this naïve period in his life, so long ago, for which he now forgave himself. How quickly theology
and the study of God had become ugly — the mere politics of power, the defense of empty dogma
for the sake of a someone’s ambition, or everyone else’s fear. He sighed again. Lately a feeling of
emptiness drained him constantly, a feeling born, he guessed, of too much knowledge and the

inability to resolve things. The increasingly desperate hope that things in his life would not just be
words.

And yet surely there is a way to love the world, he thought, accusing himself of getting lost,
losing sight of the overall perspective he had worked so hard to cultivate. He rebooted the
computer, then closed it down for a second time, redundantly. I’m a chameleon, he thought. I’m
like a fish on a reef, hiding itself by adapting to its surroundings just to stay alive. I have no higher
purpose, and the more I try to save the world the more I have to fight just to save my own skin.
And the world keeps turning.

Still other memories returned to him from his years as a boxer in the ghettoes of Lodz, the
years during the war when he had supported his entire family in the makeshift boxing rings set up
secretly on Saturday nights inside the warehouses. For all the money that was betted and changed
hands, who would have thought there was so much wealth left in the ghettos. When you have a lot
less, he thought, and you need to survive each day, then the need for explanations disappears. Your
purpose is just to stay alive. That’s all. As long as there’s life there’s hope, and you don’t adorn it
with high-minded beliefs.

Netzer still thought and lived this primal philosophy. For him. Israel was land, land to be
defended, and it had nothing to do with religion or ideology. In his bones Ariel envied his friend’s
simplicity, even if he could not always admire it. Netzer was in charge of Mossad because of who
he was — because of the power of his personality. He was not to be judged by the same standards
as other men, Ariel had long ago realized. The accomplishments that distinguish people we admire
— intelligence, courage, endurance — meant little against the sheer force of Netzer’s character. He
was a major event all by himself, a primal force.

I just hope the Vatican doesn’t go too far this time, Ariel thought. The last war between
them had been bitterly destructive. Too much blood had been shed over the years, much of it
hidden from public view in underworld sparring matches between the Church and the intelligence
agencies.

He walked back out into the office and thanked Netzer’s secretary. They exchanged a few
routine pleasantries and Ariel left the way he had come in. The reflective mood that had seized
him in Netzer’s office vanished as soon as he hit the street.

He headed to the museum. He knew there was no time. Instinctively he felt that within
days, or even hours, knowledge of the relics would leak and there would be agents and
mercenaries crawling all over Southern Lebanon, looking for them. Gad needed his help. He
shook his head and smiled again as he re-thought a few minor details of the plan he was about to
set into action. It would make Hollywood look lame.

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