What I can’t figure out is why Manning is so insistent on holding tight to Rachel. Forget her, I tell him. Let her go! If she is working with Instancer, as half our evidence and instincts say she is, she’ll do everything in her power to sabotage us. She’ll play innocent, like she has from the start. Then in the fatal moment she’ll betray us.

ME

Don’t tell me you trust her now?

MANNING

I don’t even trust you, Dewey.

Meanwhile, I’m poring over maps of the Holy Land. Before, I had only the sketchiest notion of the geography of Israel and her Arab neighbors. Forty-eight hours of delays and forced layovers, however, have given me ample opportunity to bone up.

I had no idea that Israel was so small, the size of New Jersey. You can drive cross-country in an hour and ten minutes.

I’m memorizing place names and topography. I know now where Tel Aviv is (on the coastal plain, along the Mediterranean) and where Jerusalem sits (about sixty miles east, and high—twenty-five hundred feet—on the crest of the drop-off into Jordan and the highway across the desert to Amman).

I find Megiddo. It’s in the north, near the Sea of Galilee. The Gehenna dig is there, so close the two names butt against each other on the map.

In the waiting area at Halifax Stanfield International, a fellow passenger—a nun in a habit—watches me paging through maps and guidebooks. She asks what my purpose is in traveling to the Holy Land.

ME

We’re going to confront the devil at Armageddon and stop him from destroying the world.

“Well,” she says without a trace of irony, “good luck with that.”

I’m beginning as well to grasp the link between climate and geography.

Africa and the Middle East are the canaries in the global weather coal mine. What happens there today happens in Kansas tomorrow. Khamsins, simooms, siroccos. I had never heard of any of these five years ago. They’re the hot, dry winds that formerly tormented the region only in season, rising out of the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula. Now they’re year-round and twenty degrees Celsius hotter than they’ve ever been. Commercial air traffic to the Middle East (and even military flights) is down to a fifth of what it had been only a few years ago.

The place is too hot to fly.

I’m filing reports, working on my timeline, and logging onto every Hebrew and Arabic political site I can find.