The Last Judgment (32 page)

“Tell me something. About your ‘sightseeing' in Jerusalem that prior summer. Did you ever travel to the Temple Mount?”

Gilead paused. He fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair, as if he were trying to decide how to answer.

“A simple question,” Will said. “Gilead—tell me straight. Did you visit the Temple Mount?”

“You know it's a highly restricted site. The Muslims jealously guard it. They say that it's sacred to them…the Haram al-Sharif. That's Arabic for the ‘Noble Sanctuary'…”

“Yes, I know all about that,” Will said tersely. “Did you go there?”

“I consider it nothing less than a miracle that I got in,” his client said, looking at the table. “Yes, I did visit it.”

“You went there?” Will asked incredulously.

“Yes. I spoke Arabic. I told them I wanted to visit the sites so holy to the Islamic religion. I told them I had been raised a Shiite. The guards let me in.”

“Why did you go there? Why?”

“Curious, I guess…”

“As a former Muslim, now a Christian, you go to the most volatile place on the globe—on a whim? Because you're just curious? Come on, Gilead…”

“What do you want me to say? I'm telling you the truth. I felt called to come back to the Middle East…to be a Christian missionary here. I wanted to know all about the sites that were central to what God is doing…in unfolding His plan for the end times…”

“Did you scout out the Temple Mount plateau so explosives could be placed there? So that your friends in the Knights of the Temple Mount could know how, where, and when to place them?”

Gilead was stunned. He leaned back in his chair and lifted both hands in the air.

“I can't believe you are saying these things. No. The answer is no. Absolutely not.”

Will leaned back, pushing away his notes. Now it was time to go deeper. He needed to assess not just the actions or the statements of his client…he had to go further. Beyond even his mental processes. He needed to know something about what had been going on in the soul of Gilead Amahn.

“Why did you go to the Islamic Center in northern Virginia?” He looked Gilead in the eyes. “Why did you preach to that mufti when you knew it might end up sparking a riot?”

“I felt called to do that.”

“By God?”

“Yes. To preach the gospel to the people I had come from. To the religious tradition I was raised in.”

“Why did you go to Cairo?”

“Same reason.”

“Called by the Lord? Is that what you're saying?”

“Yes…that's it.”

“When we went through the background information in our telephone conversations, you said that Louis Lorraine befriended you in Cairo. And drove you to Jerusalem.”

“That's right.”

“And the two of you talked about theological things? Religious theories?”

“Yes, in part.”

“And he talked in some way…about the appearing of the Promised One? A great religious leader who would usher in the Golden Age?”

“Yes, we did talk about that.”

The attorney waited a long time before speaking again. After a while, Gilead began shifting in his chair. He got a quizzical look on his face, waiting for his lawyer to continue.

“Do you think you're a messiah?” Will asked quietly.

Gilead's eyes widened again. He spread his open hands out and though he opened his mouth, no words came out. So Will pressed in.

“You understand my question. It's not difficult. You're an intelligent man. Do you consider yourself a messiah?”

“I can't believe you're asking me…what in the world would make you ask that question…”

“Are you?”

“Of course not. I've never called myself a messiah…ever…ridiculous…you should know that.”

“But you've publicly called yourself something else, haven't you? In Jerusalem before the bombing, you called yourself a prophet?”

Gilead paused.

“I think I used that term…I was called by God…I think I said I felt called by God to fulfill a prophetic role. To do the work of a prophet.”

After a dead silence fell, the younger man asked a question of his attorney.

“Is it that bad?”

“It's enough.”

“Enough for what?” His lip was starting to tremble.

“Enough to send you to the death chamber.”

Gilead was now covering his face with his hands. He said something low, almost a moan, but Will couldn't hear it. But after a few seconds, he spoke up.

“Everything I prayed for…what I tried to do for God…I just wanted to be the sword of the Holy Spirit. To bring people to Christ. And now…it's all gone to ruin.”

Will sat motionless in his chair, waiting for the last of Gilead's emotional expiation.

“A terrible massacre…people killed…how could things have gone so wrong? My fault…all of it must be my fault…”

He was starting to weep. Just then the metal door swung open abruptly, and two Palestinian guards stepped in and ordered Will to leave the room, telling him that his conference time was up.

As he was escorted to the door, he reached out quickly and squeezed his client's shoulder.

“This is not over. You and I still have a lot to talk about.”

But as one of the guards escorted his client out and slammed shut the thick metal door, Will sensed that something else was closing. Some window, or door, of understanding. Now he was on the outside looking in. Gilead's presence at the scene of the crime, or the fact that he had delivered an incendiary sermon about the Temple Mount just seconds before the blast, could not be innocently explained away. That just did not seem plausible. Not by a long stretch.

Will recognized there was much being hidden from him. And whether the forces concealing it were good or evil, he did not yet know.

48

T
HE NEXT DAY
, W
ILL WAS IN THE BACKSEAT
of a taxi as it zigzagged through the narrow, crowded streets, fighting the early morning traffic of Jerusalem. Ordinarily, the route from Will's hotel in downtown Jerusalem to the building which now housed the Palestinian International Tribunal should have taken only ten or fifteen minutes. But with the rush hour, Will figured it would take him close to thirty minutes.

He looked out the window of the taxi at the narrow storefronts and winding limestone walls that lined the streets, some of which were plastered with political signs and posters—some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, most now faded, torn, and flapping in the breeze.

Will was en route to his first court appearance in Gilead Amahn's case. After his initial conference with his client, Will had arranged for his driver to take him to his hotel. For the rest of the day and into the night, he had reviewed the procedural rules for the tribunal and read some background about potential judges.

Mira Ashwan had provided some limited information on the identities of the five judges that had been assigned to work with the tribunal. But the information was scant. Will was looking for anything that would give him some ideological history on them. Unfortunately, Mira had failed to provide that.

Will knew that when the UN had funded the tribunal's creation, a compromise deal had been cut. Most of the judges of the tribunal would be from other nations, but the chief judge was to be a Palestinian. The law they would apply, including the
prescribed penalties, would be the recently created criminal code of the Palestinian Authority, but the procedural laws for the court had been hammered out by an international team.

The UN had appointed four of the five judges on the tribunal panel, and the chief judge had been chosen by the Palestinian Authority. Their courthouse was the Orient House, a privately owned palace in Jerusalem with a tattered history, used historically by Palestinians for political operations.

The selection of the three-judge panel for Gilead's case was supposedly random. The two non-selected judges would sit for the “motions chamber,” hearing pretrial matters and attending to discovery and scheduling issues in the case.

Will had just learned the day before that his “motions judge” who was conducting the scheduling conference that day was an American, Carrie Tabir. With the help of his staff back in Monroeville, he'd been able to get some research on her. A former federal magistrate judge, she was a Michigan University law professor, currently on leave to assist in the Temple Mount trials. She was also considered, generally speaking, to be sympathetic to Palestinian complaints against Israeli “occupation.” Further, she had authored a law-review article that criticized the Israeli security fence that had been erected to slow down the influx of suicide bombers and other terrorists, calling it a “human-rights violation.”

Another judge assigned to the tribunal, English judge Horace Luddington, a jurist with impeccable credentials, had recently fallen ill and had to return to England, Will had learned.

That meant that he now knew, with almost absolute certainty, the identity of the three judges who would be hearing the trial of Gilead Amahn. With that information in hand, Will made a phone call to Barrister Nigel Newhouse in London. Newhouse happily took the call, and the two briefly caught each other up about their cases.

Will then explained that he needed detailed background on the three judges who would be trying Gilead's case.

Newhouse noted that the “president” of the tribunal, who would function as the chief judge, was Saad Mustafa—longtime legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority and chief counsel to its president. He had helped draft the Palestinian constitution.

Newhouse explained that after he had been retained to represent Gilead Amahn, one of his first actions had been to file a motion objecting to Mustafa sitting as a potential judge for the case, based not only on his intimate association with the Palestinian cause, but on his Muslim identification as well.

“Of course, my motion for recusal was denied,” the British lawyer said sardonically. “So I'm afraid you are stuck with Mr. Mustafa. That's going to be one of your votes—and I think he will vote for conviction.”

“And there's one of the two votes needed for conviction,” Will noted. “No unanimous verdict like in a criminal case in the U.S.”

“Which brings us to the next judge,” Newhouse continued. “Alain Verdexler. He's from Belgium. Former member of the Belgian Supreme Court. He's around seventy or so by now. More bad news for you, I'm afraid—after retiring, he wrote a scathing article critical of the court's reluctance to take up a war-crimes case against several high-ranking American officers. A Belgian national had been killed in Afghanistan as part of the United States' war on terrorism, and Verdexler felt that war crimes should have been brought against the Americans.”

“Lovely,” Will said. “And I don't think that a motion for recusal against him is going to succeed. Particularly if you were unable to knock Mustafa off the court. I doubt that Verdexler's public pronouncements against so-called American war crimes would be seen as sufficient proof of prejudice.”

“Not likely,” Newhouse said, agreeing. “Though Gilead Amahn is a naturalized American citizen, that's not going to suffice to get Verdexler off your court.”

Newhouse then described the third member.

“Lee Kwong-ju is a former judge on the appellate court of South Korea. A judicious man, scholarly. Good judicial temperament.
Seems to be fairly immune to political pressure, even when he was involved in some controversial South Korean cases that implicated the politics between North and South Korea. He may be your only hope. But, unfortunately—well, I'm a bit of a tennis player myself, and if we were at Wimbledon they'd say, ‘You're still shy of a deuce'—even if Lee Kwong-ju votes for acquittal, you still lose unless you also get Verdexler on your side.”

Newhouse's comments were still echoing in Will's mind as the taxi pulled up in front of the Orient House. A couple dozen Palestinian protestors had gathered at the ornate gates that blocked public entrance to the limestone palace, and several television cameras and reporters were interviewing some of them. As Will paid the fare and grabbed his briefcases, one of the reporters recognized him, broke from the group of protestors, and ran over.

“Mr. Chambers, as Mr. Amahn's newest lawyer, what do you expect to happen in court today?”

“Just procedural matters,” Will said, then waved off any further questions.

When the protestors discovered that Will was Gilead's attorney, one of them began shouting, “Hassan Gilead Amahn is a murderer! He is a tool of the Israeli butchers! You will be crushed!”

Suddenly, a handful of Jerusalem police jumped out of their Jeeps and ran over to Will.

With an Israeli police escort, he walked quickly to the tall, ornate gate, where he was checked through Palestinian security. As the gate opened and the attorney walked up to the Orient House Palace, he mused on how ironic it was that this building would be the site of Gilead Amahn's trial.