A sneak preview of Steve Teets' upcoming sequel to "The Great Trespass"

ivory storm

The explosion was so violent, even at a mile away, it hurled Taylor Cerutti out of her bed. As the thirty-four-year-old antiquarian tried to wake and understand what had thrown her onto the floor, a second explosion rocked downtown Jerusalem. As powerful as the first, the floor of the hotel room shook, causing her to bounce uncontrollably into the nightstand, banging her head. "What the hell was that?" Taylor mumbled to herself as she stood, both her head and posterior throbbing. She stumbled, still half asleep, to the window and pulled back the curtains. Dawn was just arriving in the ancient city and the shadows still held the light at bay. To her left, barely in view, she could see a column of smoke piercing the yellow tinted sky. Taylor rubbed the bump on the side of her head, trying to remember what was in the smoke's direction. She gasped as a realization came to her, "Oh my god, it couldn't be." The sound of sirens built in the background. They began intermittingly and increased as each second ticked by. They were closing toward downtown. As much as she prayed she was wrong, deep down she knew where the emergency vehicles were heading: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Taylor's cell phone rang. Still dazed from her abrupt waking, it took her several rings to find where it had also bounced onto the floor. "This is Taylor." "Oh my goodness, Taylor! Are you alright?" asked the panicked voice of her Moroccan research assistant, Quisa Firah. "Quisa.... Yes..... I got tossed out of bed, but everything seems okay." Though she verbalized she was fine, Taylor still felt groggy and a part of her wondered if she was in the middle of a nightmare. "What's happened?" "An explosion in the Old City. I think it might be the Mosque of the Ascension." Taylor closed her eyes. The Mosque or Church of the Ascension, was another name for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where she had been studying over the past six weeks. The same place where she'd been shown a gateway to another world. Taylor opened her eyes and once again crossed to the window. The sky was brightening as the sunrise took hold, but the column of smoke was still there and it was expanding. "Come get me Quisa, I'll be out front," she told her assistant. Taylor did a quick look in the mirror. Her auburn hair was a mess and her perfect olive complected skin had its morning parched and flaky appearance. She splashed some water on her face and reinspected. "That'll have to do," she mumbled as she grabbed her jeans and top from yesterday and dressed without a shower or brushing her teeth. She needed to get to the Hotel's front and evaluate what had happened to the east. Two minutes later, she exited the lobby of the Seven Arches Hotel. Sitting atop the Mount of Olives, the hotel spied westward across the Holy City. It was an impressive location, and tourist buses steadily streamed by the entrance to a parking lot that provided spectacular views of the Holiest of Sites in Jerusalem. On this morning, terror gripped the crowd as hotel guests joined dozens of tourists to watch the aftermath of the explosions that sent a column of billowing smoke expanding upwards and toward them. Inbound cars and buses, heading to the summit, had stopped in their tracks when the blasts interrupted their scheduled tourist activities. Taylor moved between two of those cars, to the far side of the road where a stone wall guarded a Jewish cemetery below. She was numb. She didn't know if it was fear or sadness. All she knew was that she felt like she was walking through a dreamland. A man and woman came up on her left and stared in the same direction. "The news says both explosions came from Holy Sepulchre, but the damage spreads much further," the man said in English, but with a decidedly German accent. "This is horrible," the woman said, with a New York twang, as she shook her head slowly. Taylor took a deep breath and stared across the ancient city. She would have been in the bowels of that Church in a couple of hours. By the miracle of timing, she was safe here, watching the column of smoke swallow the surrounding neighborhoods.