Read Online The Christmas Train by David Baldacci - Free Book Online Page A

not unpredictable in its predictableness. You knew something would happen; you just didn’t know exactly where or what form it would take.
    Mark Twain had visited the Holy Land and wrote extensively about it in The Innocents Abroad . The book was published in 1869, a year before Zion was resettled by the Jews and almost ninety years before Israel was established as a sovereign state. Twain had found Palestine to be very tiny, writing that he “could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.” Tom understood exactly what he meant. The place that loomed so enormous to folks all over the world could be traversed from end to end in hours by car. The walled city of Jerusalem seemed but a handsome miniature the first time Tom saw it. Yet the intensity there, and the people who called it home, lived up to its reputation as one of the most magnetic places on earth.
    They’d traveled the country in search of stories, although Eleanor had also sought out more personal experiences, once even being baptized in the Jordan River. Twain, too, had swum in the Jordan River after a long, dusty ride from Damascus, though more for hygienic than spiritual purposes. Tom and Eleanor had bought Jordanian water in clear bottles molded to look like Jesus and sent them back home, together with holy air in a can, collected in churches of antiquity in Israel. Tom had always understood that both items were immensely popular with American tourists, who’d rush home with the air and water and bestow it on their own places of worship. He supposed they did so in the hopes of raising them a few pegs in the eyes of God—hedging their bets, so to speak.
    During the years they had lived in Israel, the pair had also ventured to Bethlehem one Christmas with a tour group because Eleanor had wanted to see the place where the son of God had been delivered into a sinful world. Though he was not a particularly religious person, it was still a humbling event for Tom to be in close proximity to where an event of that magnitude reportedly took place.
    In his trip to Bethlehem Mark Twain had reported that all sects of Christians, except Protestants, had chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, he also observed that one group dared not trespass on the other’s territory, proving beyond doubt, he noted, that even the grave of the Savior couldn’t inspire peaceful worship among different beliefs. Some things clearly hadn’t changed since Mark Twain was a pilgrim in the Holy Land all those years ago.
    The two American journalists had been one of the very few in Israel who celebrated the holiest of Christian holidays. Tom and Eleanor had put up a small Christmas tree in their apartment and cooked their holiday meal and opened presents. Then they looked out on the darkness of the Mediterranean and took in the sights and smells of the desert climate while celebrating an event most Americans associated with snow, a jolly fat man, and crackling fires. Then they fell asleep in each other’s arms. Those Christmases in Tel Aviv were some of the most wonderful of Tom’s life. Except for the last one.
    Eleanor left the apartment to do some last-minute grocery shopping. About forty minutes later she came back and said that she wanted to go home, that she was tired of covering the perils of this strange world, that it was just time to go home. At first Tom thought she was joking. Then it became apparent she wasn’t. In fact, while he was standing there, she started packing. Then she called El Al to get a flight home. She tried to book Tom one too, but he said no, he wasn’t leaving. Everything had seemed wonderful barely an hour before. Now he was standing in the middle of their tiny apartment in his skivvies and his whole life had just collapsed.
    He questioned her as to what had happened in the last forty minutes to cause her to make this major, life-altering decision for both of them, without bothering to consult him first. The