JANINE FEELS THE Earth move. The San Andreas Fault. A nuclear blast. Judgment Day.
Her phone.
She opens an eye.
She’s been dreaming. She’s drenched. There’s a vibration, something deep. Where is it coming from? Not the end, not yet. It’s from beneath her pillow.
“Okay, okay.” She reaches underneath the sweaty pillow and feels the vibrating phone. She registers the darkness. How long has she been asleep?
She flips open the phone. It’s 12:17. There are two texts. That’s very bad. One text is bad news. Two, worse.
Both from a private number. The first reads: “Rouge.”
She doesn’t let herself acknowledge it, or its meaning. She reads the second: “Maintenant. Hier.”
Red.
Now. Yesterday.
She picks up the pillow and uses it to wipe the sweat from her face. She searches for images from her dream, something about a boy shooting a dog in a field. She flips on the light. She swings her jeans-clad legs over the bed and stares at the fax machine. Maintenant. It won’t be long.
She takes a voracious slug from the tea next to the bed. It both quenches her thirst and prompts a gag. No training, no will, she thinks, can allow the body to work if it gets only a few hours of sleep each day. She places the tea back on the worn copy of The Killer Angels, which she picked up for the title and discovered had nothing to do, really, with murderers or angels. But was about the Battle of Gettysburg. She can’t put it down, and it is in some minor part responsible for her insomnia. Brothers fighting brothers, courage, but all the blood spilled in vain, by a godless nation. This is her guilty pleasure. The last few years, emotionally isolated, often out of communication with anyone she can trust, traveling from one bed to the next, the only common thread her books.
Of course, there is only one book, the Bible, the word.
She thinks back to how the Guardians first enlightened her about The Book, when they found her, covered in filth, starving, a child of war, in ruins on the border of Lebanon. She couldn’t have been twelve years old, and she’d been in a terrible fight with two older boys, and routed them—over ownership of a water bottle. Just another day in the refugee camps; she’d been raped, her mother too, among the other daily indignities. Then a man lifted her from the dirt. He had bad teeth, smelled of American cheese but had an angelic face, a thick cross around his neck, and a Bible. She flailed and kicked at him too. And he took her attacks, and smiled, what’s the word, “beatifically,” and he filled her water bottle. And then, trite as she’d come to think of it, he filled her soul.
He was a Guardian, of course. And he eventually trusted her enough to tell her the truth about him and the Guardians. Their secret work, how the network was sworn to protect the Holy Land, The City, Jerusalem. To keep it from being “compromised.”
That was the word the Guardians found most distasteful, evil—compromise.
If there is compromise, if the God-fearing do not truly adhere to the word of God, then the Messiah will not return.
She knows by heart the passage the man read her from Genesis:
I will be with you and will bless you, for to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands. And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.
But, she asked: aren’t the enemies the Jews, the deadly army of the Israelites, the Muslims, and the other heretics?
He smiled.
Of course not, he said. Not the true believers, the ones who favor and follow the true word of God.
Think of the biblical passage, he told her: all nations on Earth will be favored if the Bible is truly adhered to. When he explained the meaning to her, she immediately understood the equation. Israel must be reestablished as a Holy Land, one in which the God-fearing descendants of Abraham embrace the covenant. Only then will all the nations be blessed. Only then will the Messiah come. Only then will there be no more hunger, no more rape, no more fruitless tribalism.
The Guardians gave her truth, meaning, safety. Hope.
And, over the years, deadly training.
She shudders with awe when she thinks of her transformation. She was raised to trust only Syrian Christians. But what good did they do her? Weren’t they just as responsible for the rape of her dusty village, her rape? Weren’t her supposed brothers and sisters just as culpable as the Muslim hypocrites and the pious but heathen Israeli army? All the generals and politicians, all the king’s men.
Not so the Guardians. They are not one ethnic group. But they are connected in their belief. They are a true family, his children. Her siblings.
She will do anything to protect them, help save them. And now they ask a new task.
The woman called Janine closes her eyes and allows herself to imagine she’s got one big eye on the top of her head, like a Cyclops. She’s mere hours from helping to open up the Earth. Throw the ugly parts into it, like the Cyclops, scrape things clean, then let God, the one and only, sort things out.
The fax machine beeps, answers, begins to print.
Janine reaches beneath the bed. She pulls out a small suitcase, a flee bag, she calls it, just enough stuff to let her survive if she has to go on the lam. She pulls out her last clean shirt, her last clean not-whore shirt, a green blouse she made sure was loose enough not to accentuate her breasts or attract attention. Still, she thought, almost too flattering. She pushes it aside, finds a long-sleeve gray T-shirt with a University of Arizona crest.
She lifts and smells it. Not clean but dry.
The fax is halfway through its printing.
She takes off her shirt, pulls out a bra from the flee bag, clasps it, pulls on the gray T-shirt. She opens the first text. She responds: “And a good morning to you too.” She knows any vague response will suffice to acknowledge receipt.
Rouge. Red. Blood. A simple, juvenile code. Kill.
Maintenant, hier. Now. Yesterday. Translation: No time to plan. Act.
And, within that, an unstated implication: Something is going wrong. Very, very wrong.
The printing is three-quarters done. She begins to make out the face coming through on the fax. She begins to recognize it. She whispers: “No. Gracias.” Not this man, this fierce individualist, with a big brain and a divine spark. He takes no side, other than his own, and his truth. Still, there are no noncombatants.
This is the target and this is her job. And this man, the one appearing on the fax, is, apparently, the source of sudden and acute trouble. He’s doubtless begun to piece it together.
The face fully appears, the fax near complete. And now, with a tight, bitter smile, she thinks she understands the dream she just awoke from. This man is the mongrel shredded by bullets. She’s the boy with the gun.
At the edge of the facsimile, a scrawled note: Make it amateur.
She feels new sweat beads on her brow. On top of everything else, it needs to be messy.