Sanctuary of the Chosen Audiobook

The days before the wedding passed quickly. Much that had been puzzling was clarified as the four friends spent long hours talking—sometimes in quiet sorrow for things past or regretted, sometimes in exuberant and joyous laughter as they rehearsed the ways in which God had led them to this hour. The tragic death of Viktor at the hands of an Archon after Carla had half-carried him out of the disint...

“What happens if the police are waiting for us?” asked Miriam. Looking down from clear skies at the menacing smog bank shrouding Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, she was reminded of the perils facing the two fugitives as soon as they landed. “Tel Aviv could have called by now.” “Relax,” Ari admonished, putting a protective arm around her. “If we look nervous, they might take us for drug smugglers...

“Can you be in the lobby of the King David in thirty minutes?” The urgency was apparent as soon as Yakov heard the voice on the other end of the line. “Ah, David… I was just getting ready to go out to visit Ari. What’s up?”  “This is related. I’ll see you at the King David!” There was no hiding the suppressed excitement in his friend’s voice.

“Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” asked Ari. With great effort, he directed the question to the new orderly who stood before him balancing a medical tray. “What’s your name?” In one of his more lucid moments, Ari was sitting on his bed in his large, shared room. Having difficulty knowing where he was and remembering almost nothing since he had returned to Israel, he was, nevertheless, getting disjoi...

Confined to a small apartment on one of Tel Aviv’s back streets and under constant guard, Ari found the next few months to be the most difficult period of his entire life. Miriam had promised to marry him as soon as possible—and now he was unable even to see her. In an earlier time, Ari would have made his escape and given the Mossad a run for their money. Now, however, instead of taking things in...

After about an hour’s wait, Ari was at last escorted in by a secretary. As soon as he entered the room he could sense the animosity. He was no longer one of them. He’d already been written off as the enemy. Besides the Chief and David, the other four were strangers to Ari. He knew of them by reputation but had never met any of them, nor was he properly introduced now. The Chief simply recited thei...

Early the next morning, David came by the apartment, picked up Ari and the tape he and Yakov had made the night before, and drove him to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. Wondering why it was required, Ari brought along the suitcase with two weeks’ change of clothing that he’d been told to pack. David looked grim but seemed unwilling or unable to explain his somber mood. “Don’t say anything about b...

Take another look! Had he heard a voice? Or had the words just emerged from his mind? Take a closer look! There it was again, and still he couldn’t tell whether it was a voice speaking to him from outside or words sounding in his head. What did it mean? Take a closer look at what? At the fissure blocking his route? At possible ways to bridge it? Hesitantly, Ari stood up and looked around. Nothing...

Dead… alive… some state in between? Ari sensed only the searing pain suffusing his body. How long he’d lain there drifting in and out of consciousness he did not know. When at last he had fully regained his senses, he moved first one limb, then another, and decided that, though horribly bruised, he was all in one piece. Had any of the others survived? “Hello!” he called out into the blackness. Not...

The press corps, limited to thirty reporters from the world’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines, and handpicked by Carla, had a block of seats in the center of the auditorium. No television coverage was allowed. Ari found his assigned place and sat down. Behind him, the delegates were pouring in. Ari found it strangely ominous to see these sophisticated political leaders jostling their way...

It was a long flight from Tel Aviv to London to Los Angeles, where they spent the night, then up to San Francisco the next morning. Due to limited space in the auditorium where the congress would be held, Israel had been allowed only one political delegate, Yetsak Kaufy, and one religious leader, Rabbi Mordechai Margolins, a popular and influential Lubavitcher—and one media representative, which,...

The next two years were lonely ones. Miriam seldom came to Jerusalem. She was very friendly when, on rare occasions, she dropped in at Yakov’s apartment, but that almost made it more painful. There seemed no hope that any romantic relationship could be reestablished. The one thing Ari had to look forward to was his trip to California—and his impatience to face that challenge only made the months p...

On May 13, 1991, an unusual news item came across the wires at The Jerusalem Post. Ari’s first reaction was to dismiss it as simply bizarre. The more he thought about it, however, the more intrigued he became. Late that afternoon, after some intensive research, Ari walked into the office of his editor, Ruta Cohen, and sat down to discuss his findings with her. “What’s on your mind, Ari? Onto a sco...

By the time Ari returned, Yakov, who usually retired early, was already in bed and sound asleep. His peculiar whistling snore could be heard as Ari tiptoed down the hall and into his own room. Whatever his eccentricities, the old man’s religion had definitely cleansed his conscience and given him peace of mind. He seemed to drop off quickly and sleep soundly all night—and had scarcely expressed a...

Yakov had been idly rocking back and forth in his favorite chair, eyes closed, listening carefully to all that David had been telling Ari. Now he came back to life, sat up straight, and turned abruptly to Ari. “Stay out of it! The CIA’s being set up. ‘The Nine’ aren’t ETIs.” “Come on, Yakov,” returned David uneasily, “let’s not get sidetracked onto that demon thing again… okay?” “You just listen t...

The following Monday, Ari received a response to the letter he had written to Carla. It was enthusiastic and gave promise of further contact. “How good it was to hear from you,” her letter began. “And how sad I was to have confirmation of Nicole’s death. I saw her name on the list of victims in the news but wasn’t sure whether that was the same person to whom you had introduced me. I tried to phon...

The ground war in the Gulf was over almost before it had begun—in one hundred hours. Was this just a good round figure that appealed to President Bush when he gave the ceasefire order—or was something more involved? His generals in the field had been unhappy at calling off their forces prematurely and thus leaving Saddam, an Arab Hitler, still in power. Why had the decision been made at that exact...

David showed up promptly at eight o’clock and joined Ari in the living room, sitting next to him in front of the picture window. He wasted no time getting down to business. “There are some bizarre aspects to what I’m going to tell you,” he began, leaning forward and punctuating the tension in his voice by stroking the knuckles of his strong, restless fingers. The lights had just gone on, illuminat...

So it was possible to be abducted by PLO terrorists right in the heart of Jerusalem! That alarming experience served as a solemn warning to Ari. Indeed, he had been very lucky. And he was on the PLO hit list because of what he wrote in his column in the Post! No doubt he’d now been moved up a little higher in targeting priority. That was not a comforting thought. How he wished for his old faithful...

The aerial bombardment of Iraq began on January 15, 1991. Ari wasn’t surprised at the uncompromising stand taken by the U.S. President and his coalition partners in their pursuit of Kuwait’s liberation. He was surprised, however, at the overwhelming superiority of American technology, resulting in such astonishingly few allied losses. The allegedly invincible Republican Guard was pinned down and p...

The next morning found Miriam, with Ari beside her, expertly threading her small Fiat through the maze of streets in the Old City and out to the hilltop Holocaust Museum, not far from the Knesset. As they drove, he learned that she was a widow, having lost her husband of six weeks in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They’d had no children, and she had never remarried. Sitting next to her, he felt a sense...

As the weeks turned to months, Ari’s strange street encounter, instead of fading into the past, seemed all the more vivid and troublesome. There was no way he could deny its reality, though he wasn’t sure what that meant in relation to an “intelligence” that could take on different forms, do the impossible, and appear and disappear apparently at will. His undergraduate work in physics had, in a se...

Life in Israel was settling into a routine of near-boredom. So Israel was surrounded by enemies who might attack at any moment. What else was new? Terrorism, yes, but a major attack, no. Not without the Soviet Union to back the invaders, and that was no longer feasible. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, just as Ari knew had been the plan all along, had given the Soviet leadership so many inter...

“David!” exclaimed Yakov as he pulled the door open. “Great to see you! I’ve got a roommate—all the way from Paris. This is Ari Thalberg. Ari, meet David Kauly.” Ari felt himself instantly and comprehensively scrutinized, analyzed, and memorized by the slightly balding, stocky man of medium height in his mid-forties who catapulted himself through the doorway and grasped his hand. “So you’ve moved...

Nothing Uzi might have said could possibly have prepared Ari for the little gnome of a man who answered to his knock a few hours later. A very round, wrinkled face topped by unruly white hair and punctuated by the brightest of blue eyes peered out through the doorway and sized up Ari in one glance. “Come in, come in,” came the hearty greeting in barely understandable English and the thickest of ac...