Kitabı oku: «The Spoils of War»
The Spoils of War
Gordon Kent
T. Cuyler young
Donald G. Cameron
They went further than seemed possible
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Excerpt
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Part Two
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part Three
18
19
20
Coda
About The Author
Other Books By
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Kosovo-Albania Border, 1997
The late afternoon rain sent the Albanian soldiers into the cover of the trees. Dukas thought the move was probably for the best. What he had seen of the Albanians scared him, and he was glad when they walked off up the road to the stand of oak trees, shouting at each other and carrying their rifles across their necks like ox yokes.
The rain beat on the windshield of Dukas’s borrowed Land Rover and the wipers droned back and forth, harmonizing with the heater and the raindrops on the roof, washing away some of the mud accumulated in a nine-hour drive across “the former Yugoslavia.” There was mud from Bosnia and mud from Croatia and a little mud from Kosovo, all washing off into the ruined tarmac of a road in Albania.
“Have a little faith, okay,” muttered the Mossad guy in the back seat. Actually, there were two Mossad guys in the back seat, but one of them was so obviously a bureaucratic functionary that Dukas ignored him. Dukas tried to adjust his body language so that he was not telegraphing his views on the afternoon quite so blatantly. He looked back.
“When do you want to call this off?” he asked.
“Give the man another hour.”
His name was Shlomo, he had said. Dukas thought the name was funny, but the man himself was serious. Now, he moved his hand slightly to indicate that, no, he didn’t expect their quarry to appear either, and that, yes, they were going to wait an hour because he, Shlomo, was under the scrutiny of someone who had sent a bureaucrat to watch him.
Dukas liked Shlomo. And he didn’t mind helping the Israelis, as long as his own investigations into Bosnian Muslim war crimes benefited from helping them. He pulled a headset up over his ears and keyed his radio.
“Roger, Squid, I copy you,” the voice on the other end said. The Canadians he had picked up as an ops team thought it was hilarious that Dukas was attached to the US Navy, and they called him Squid at every opportunity.
“Give it another six zero minutes.”
“Roger, copy.” The Canadians were in cover along the Albanian side of the border. Dukas had looked for them a few times and failed, but they answered radio calls and they had stayed in their positions all day; now they would all be drenched in addition to tired. By contrast, the Albanians had a roaring fire going in the tree line; at dusk, both the smoke and the fire must have shown for miles. But Dukas would not have been allowed here without the “support” of the Albanians.
A column of headlights showed across the ridge to the south in Kosovo. Dukas and Shlomo had their binoculars up in an instant and then back in their laps. They both sighed on much the same note.
“He’ll come in this lot,” the bureaucrat said.
Dukas shook his head. Shlomo said, “No, David. It’s just local militia crossing the border to buy weapons.”
“Why can’t he be in among them? He could be with them.” The Mossad bureaucrat, who had introduced himself as David, sounded as if he believed that he could make his assertions true by repeating them. He had the makings of a politician, Dukas thought.
“He doesn’t have that kind of contact.”
“You don’t know that.” David sounded petulant.
Dukas listened to them and wondered what made their target, a Lebanese, so important that David would get his penny loafers dirty coming to collect him, especially as it was Dukas who would have to do the work and who would do the interrogation. As was almost always the case when he was working with foreign intelligence people, Dukas suspected that he was being used. He was a cynic. But he was usually right.
He cleared his throat. The two men in the back fell silent. “How is it that a Muslim Lebanese doesn’t have contacts in Kosovo?” he asked.
“He’s a city boy,” Shlomo said.
“You guys said he was an arms dealer.” Dukas turned to look into the back seat. It was dusk, and Shlomo’s face was almost invisible. David was leaning forward into the last sunlight. He seemed excited.
“I said his efforts helped to put guns in the hands of the Muslims in Bosnia,” Shlomo said.
The convoy of headlights over in Kosovo had descended the ridge and made it to the checkpoint at the Albanian border.
Dukas kept going. “Why does he sell arms to Bosnians and not Kosovans?”
David said, “Why don’t you do your job and let us do ours?” His words hung there for a few seconds. Shlomo’s hand twitched, as if he was going to try and withdraw the words his partner had said.
Dukas looked at his watch and turned to face the back seat again, bunching the skirts of his raincoat in his fist. “My job is to aid the UN and the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in the apprehension of war criminals.”
He turned and met David’s eyes, but the younger man returned his look with indifference. Dukas continued, “If the guy we’re after isn’t of interest to me, my job will include dropping you guys at an airport and driving back the nine hours it took me to get here. With nothing. And unless it suits me, my job has nothing to do with helping you do yours.”
David held his gaze, and then his eyes flicked away as he seemed to lose interest. He shrugged.
Shlomo shook his head.
Dukas was considering a further lecture on the subject when he heard a radio tone in his headset.
“Yeah?”
“Palm Two has movement on the hillside.”
Dukas looked over his shoulder through the rain-streaked glass reflexively; in fact, he couldn’t see anything except a yellow smudge where the Albanians had their fire. “Just Albanians,” he said.
“Palm Two says it’s a sniper with high-res optics and a ghillie suit,” reported the voice in his ear.
Dukas’s head snapped up.
“What’s happened?” Shlomo asked from the back seat.
The windshield wipers cycled. Fifty meters below them, at the checkpoint, an ancient white Zil was being searched thoroughly while its former occupants stood and smoked. One man had a briefcase. This drew Dukas’s eye.
Surprise, surprise.
“That’s our guy.” Dukas waved. He was out of the car and moving. He stopped to clutch his headset to his ear. “The guy at three o’clock in the car being searched now. No, not in the car. Next to the car. Yeah! Briefcase. Take him!” He started down the rocky hillside, paused to draw a heavy revolver from his shoulder holster.
Shlomo caught up with him and they ran down the hill together, raincoats flapping like ungainly wings.
Boom.
The shot sounded like a cannon. Two Canadian soldiers, halfway out of their concealment, froze and looked around for the source.
In his headset, the Canadian voice said, “Sniper!” and then, “Palm Two, do you have a shot?”
Pop, pop.
Dukas was now a bystander, lying full length in the wet bracken between two stones with Shlomo wedged in next to him.
Pop, pop.
“Hawk One, this is Palm Two. He’s gone. No hits.”
“Is it safe to move?” Dukas asked. He was soaked; runoff from the hillside was going right down his pants.
“Wait one.”
It took the Canadians ten minutes to clear the hillside. They found a small patch of dark khaki polyester and a one-inch square of flannel.
“That’s off his ghillie suit,” a black Nova Scotian sergeant said. He presented them to Dukas and Shlomo. “That flannel he used to wipe the optics on his rifle.” He sounded as if he was from Boston.
Dukas knelt by the body. It was impossible to establish whether this was, in fact, the man they’d come for; a fiftycaliber sniper round had removed most of his head. Dukas began to search the corpse. The man had a wallet with American dollars and several forms of ID. His clothes were all international—a Gap sweatshirt with a hood, blue jeans. The briefcase was locked to his wrist; the keys were in his jeans.
Shlomo leaned in to see what was in the case and Dukas rotated it so that he could see everything.
“This guy was an arms dealer?” Dukas said.
Shlomo shrugged. “We make mistakes, too.” Shlomo didn’t seem surprised by the contents.
Dukas pointed with a booted toe at the remnants of the jawline and lack of a head. “Was that a mistake?” he asked.
Shlomo raised his hands. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”
“You going to tell me that the Albanians shot him?” Dukas exhaled sharply. “With a fifty-cal?”
Shlomo glanced up the hill at the Land Rover. “It wasn’t right, what David said, but he is political and thinks he rules the world, okay?”
Dukas knelt again by the briefcase and began to inventory the contents. He pulled plastic freezer bags from the zippered liner of his raincoat, assigned a chain-of-custody code to each item, placed it in the freezer bag, and stuck the number on the outside. Most of the items in the briefcase were Roman coins. He did the inventory carefully, because he was angry and he didn’t want to do something stupid. Shlomo watched him for a while and then walked over to the car the dead man had arrived in and began to question the three other occupants in English and then in Turkish. Then Arabic.
In the inner pocket, Dukas found a red leather calendar book. Once, its edges had been gold-leafed, but it had been used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.
David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”
Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.
Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.
David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.
“Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”
David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.
Shlomo came back from the car.
“He attacked me,” David said.
Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”
“He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”
Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”
David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.
Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys in the pocket of his raincoat. The Canadian sergeant was standing by the Zil, watching the three terrified Kosovans and smoking. From time to time he glanced at the two Israelis.
David wiped his hands on his coat, turned away from Shlomo in obvious disgust and faced Dukas. “Give me that briefcase.”
“Don’t tempt me to start this as a homicide investigation.” David raised his hand and pointed at Dukas. “You don’t even understand what you are interfering with. Give me the briefcase.”
Dukas walked past the younger man and started up the hill, then turned. Instead of anger, he found only fatigue and boredom, as if he had played this scene too many times. “This is evidence in a war-crimes-tribunal investigation. You never mentioned a briefcase in our memorandum of understanding. You told me that this guy was some kind of terrorist heavy hitter. I don’t know why you wanted him dead, but he’s dead. Now—”
“We wanted him dead? The Albanians shot him!” David shouted, turning to Shlomo for support. Shlomo said nothing. His attention had switched from Dukas to David. He eyed him with distaste, the way tourists look at panhandlers.
Dukas shook his head, looked away, glanced back at a flicker of movement. The younger man had taken a long sliding step forward and his hand hit Dukas’s elbow hard, numbing it. Dukas dropped the briefcase but managed to pivot, block the follow-on blow, and stand over the case. Dukas had plenty of time to see that the Canadians were too far away to do anything. He risked a glance at Shlomo, who hadn’t moved.
David crouched, a relaxed martial arts position. He looked confident. “Give us the fucking briefcase.”
Dukas shook his head. He didn’t think the briefcase was worth a crap to him or any of the cases he was making, but this was too stupid a point to concede. He picked it up and held it to him like a schoolgirl holding her books and hoped that the heavy case would deflect a blow.
Shlomo stepped up behind his partner and elbowed him in the head so that he sat abruptly on the wet road. Again.
The Canadian ordered all three Kosovans to the ground and started bellowing into his radio for backup.
“It would be better if you gave us the briefcase,” Shlomo said. He sounded as tired as Dukas felt.
“Put in a request through channels.”
David moaned.
“That guy’s dangerous,” Dukas said.
“More dangerous than you know, my friend.” Shlomo wiped the rain from his eyes. “I think you’d better get out of here.”
Part One
1
Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002
Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”
Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.
“They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.
“Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”
The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.
Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”
“Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”
“Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”
The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Abe Peretz said. He grinned again. He grinned a lot, his way of saying that nothing he said was quite serious, or at least not quite as it sounded.
“As you were saying,” Bea Peretz erupted, “it’s time I started cooking if we’re ever going to eat.” She got up and gestured toward Rose. “Come help me.” She was a big woman, getting a little heavy, but she had beautiful eyes and still-black hair that lay tight against her skull and then cascaded down her back. “You guys tell each other war stories so we don’t have to listen over dinner.”
Alan Craik smiled at his wife, who had as many war stories as either of the men—chopper pilot, ex-squadron CO, currently deputy naval attaché, Bahrain—and who now gave a little shrug and let herself be led away.
That was the day that the latest fragile truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians had self-destructed when a Palestinian militant was killed by a car bomb in the West Bank. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade declared that the cease-fire was finished. Before the day was over, two soldiers had been killed at a settlement, and the Martyrs Brigade took credit.
That was also the last day of a man named Salem Qatib, who, like the cease-fire, was a victim of both sides: first the Palestinians tortured him, and then the Israelis tortured him, and then he died.
“Bea’s kind of bossy,” Abe said. He looked at the fingertips of one hand, sniffed them—an old habit. “We talk too much about being Jewish, don’t we.”
Embarrassed, Craik mumbled something vague.
“No, we do. Since we moved here, Bea and the girls have got like the Republican Party—a steady move to the right.” He gave a snort, certainly meant to show disgust. “Bea has a new bosom buddy named Esther Himmelfarb. I mean, it’s good that she’s found a friend; Bea doesn’t usually get close to people. And the woman helps her a lot—she knows where everything is, knows who to see, what to say, but—” He waved a hand. “We keep kosher—that’s new. The girls want to go live on a kibbutz, even though the kibbutzes are all turning into corporations and the days of boys-and-girls-togethertaming-the-desert are long gone. It’s a romance. All three of them have fallen in love.” He sniffed his fingers.
“You don’t like it here?”
“I’m not enchanted by living on land that the former owners gave up because they had a gun at their head. And now they’re sitting out there in refugee camps, watching me eat their dinner.”
“The Palestinians don’t exactly have the cleanest hands in the world.”
“They’re absolute shits. Just like a lot of Israelis. But overall, Israel gives me a royal pain in the butt because they’re the occupying power and that puts a special responsibility on you to behave better than the other guy—and they won’t face up to reality.” He shot Craik a look to see if he knew which reality he meant. “You can’t say ‘No right of return, no reparations’ and be a moral entity.” He rested his arms on the terrace railing and put his chin on them. “That’s why Bea says I’m a bad Jew. Because I won’t join in the national romance.”
Craik slumped lower until his spine was almost ready to fall off the seat, his long legs thrust out toward the edge of the terrace. He had his own doubts about Israel, but he had to shut up and do his job: in two days, he was supposed to meet with Shin Bet, Israel’s military intelligence, to get their input on an operation in Afghanistan.
Fifty miles south in Gaza, three men were beating the Palestinian named Salem Qatib. Two would hold the victim while the third hit him, and then they would slam him against a stone wall and shout, “What else? What else?” They were Palestinian, too.
“Your husband looks like hell, if I’m allowed to say that, Rose,” Bea Peretz was saying.
“He’s stressed out, is all.”
“What’s he doing in Israel?”
“Oh—Navy stuff. You know.” She hesitated, added, “He got a couple of extra days on his orders to try to sort of run down.”
“Israel’s a great place! Really. Even Abe thinks so.” She was pounding dough down on a board, making it thin. “I wish you could meet my friend Esther. She makes you understand how you can love this country. We all want to stay for good.”
“The Bureau’ll go along with that?”
“There’s other jobs, Rose. Some things are more important than what you do for a living.” The way she said it, Rose felt as if Bea had said it before, maybe many times—the detritus of an old argument, washed up on this woman-to-woman beach. Rose sampled a bit of something made with chopped olives and murmured, “We are what we do for a living, to some extent.”
“And we can change!” Bea hit the dough a tremendous whack! “You were going to be an astronaut once. You didn’t make it. You didn’t die.”
Only where nobody but me can see, Rose thought. She said, “Anyway, maybe Abe’s not so invested in it as I was.”
“Oh—Abe!” Bea cut the dough into squares with great slashes of a knife. “Abe could sell bread from a pushcart and be happy! He lives in such a fog—”
“How’s Rose coping with not being an astronaut?” Peretz said to Alan Craik. They were still on the terrace, new drinks in their hands, the sky almost blue-black.
“I think it almost killed her, but—you know Rose. Get on with life.” He sipped at his weak gin and tonic. “She’s going to be deep-select for captain.”
Peretz looked out at the sky for a long time, and when he spoke it was clear that he’d hardly listened to the answer to his own question. “If I get a transfer, I don’t think Bea’ll go with me. Or the girls.”
“Well, if they’re in school—”
Peretz bounced a knuckle against his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a thing, to watch a family go in the tank because of—” He sighed. “It’s never just one thing, is it. Bea and I have always had a—You know, the relationship has always been noisy. But suddenly—It’s this damned place. Jesus.” He stared at his fingers. “Religion’s soaked into the goddam soil here. Like Love Canal.”
Salem Qatib, who had been beaten, lay in one rut of a Gaza road. By and by somebody would have driven along the road and run over him, but a Palestinian who knew about the torture and who was a Mossad informer got on a cell phone and alerted his control.
Over dinner—candles, no kids, Israeli wine, lamb and grains in a recipe that was millennia old—the Craiks tried to talk about old friends and old days and things that didn’t have to do with Israel or being Jewish. But as more wine was poured, Bea didn’t want to talk about anything else, as if they had a scab that she wanted to scratch and watch bleed. She cited her friend Esther often—“Esther says.” Even Nine-Eleven, the topic of conversation everywhere in those days, brought her back to Israel. “Now you know what it’s like!” she cried. “Now you know what the Arabs are!” She gestured at Abe with a fork. “You’ll say next that we should be more understanding, because al-Qaida blew up the World Trade Center because they’re misunderstood!”
Abe started to say that he never said, and so on, and she interrupted, and so on.
“Bea enjoys being a caricature,” Peretz said, smiling to show it was a joke and failing. “Bea, beautiful Bea, light of my life, could we talk about baseball?”
“Esther says the Palestinians are terrorists and invaders and we ought to throw them out and keep them the fuck out!”
“‘We,’” Abe said, smiling at them.
“Arafat is a monster. He’s paying the terrorists, killing women and children, and pretending to want peace. Esther says they live out there like animals; they live in kennels; they’re barely able to read and write and they say they have ‘universities,’ my God!”
“When our great-grandparents lived in the shtetls, the Russians called them animals; they couldn’t read or write; they—”
“And they came here and they made the desert bloom! They built real universities! They made a nation!”
“On land that they took with the gun,” Abe said wearily.
“Because it was ours!”
Abe looked at Alan and gave an apologetic shrug. The silence grew longer, and Abe said, falsely cheerful, “What d’you hear from Mike Dukas?”
Maybe because she had had too much wine, Bea broke in with, “I’ll never forgive Mike Dukas for saying that Jonathan Pollard was a traitor! Never. Never, never, never!”
“But Pollard was a traitor,” Abe made the mistake of saying.
He was probably going to explain that somebody who sells American secrets to another state, even if it’s Israel, is in fact a traitor, but Bea said in a suddenly quiet voice, “I know what you think,” and she turned away and began to talk to Rose about having daughters.
Then things were easier for a while, and they got through dessert, and Alan looked at his watch and at Rose, and when Bea brought in coffee everything would have been all right if Rose hadn’t asked for cream, and there was embarrassment and confusion, and Abe explained the kosher rule of thumb and ended, smiling as at a great joke, “It’s a dietary law, which I’d be happy to explain the logic of if I understood it myself.”
Bea said, “If you were half the Jew you ought to be, you’d understand it.”
“But I must be a Jew—my mother was Jewish. Okay, Bea?”
She dropped her voice to a purr. “Abe means he’s a modern Jew. Just like everybody else—no funny foods, no embarrassing hat, no accent—oy veh! that he should have an accent!—he should be taken for a Presbyterian, maybe. Assimilate, right, Abe? That’s the magic word, right? Assimilate European high culture and never look back—Dostoevsky, Mozart, and Wittgenstein, right?”
In the embarrassed silence, Alan said, “Who’s Wittgenstein?”
She stared at him, broke into loud laughter, then patted him on the cheek. “I love you, Al—you’re perfect.”
Alan looked at his wife and got the slightly wide-eyed look: Say nothing; we’ll leave soon.
Salem Qatib lay on a table now. A big Israeli was leaning over him shouting Shit! again and again, and then he screamed at another man, “You stupid asshole, you’ve fucking killed him!”
Acco, Israel
Rashid Halaby sat in the dark with his back against a wall that had been built when Augustus was Caesar. The fancy American flashlight that his mother had given him for his birthday had a new battery, but it was running down now. He had his cell phone, but the signal couldn’t penetrate the layers of rock and mud brick above him. He was hungry. He was filthy. He was thirsty and had no water. His ribs hurt every time he took a deep breath or moved in a certain way, from a fall.
Salem, his best friend—taken. Beaten.
Rashid had run from the dig in Gaza, fought the men who had tried to stop him. He had run and left Salem to their attackers. Then he had hidden, then hitched a ride with workers from a kiln going back to their homes in Israel. He thought he might have killed a man—a Hamas man. With a rock hammer.
He couldn’t go home.
His hand dug almost of its own volition, scrabbling in the ancient dirt. He built a little pile of worthless artifacts; the bones of a small animal, some shells, a coil of brass or bronze wire, something that might have been a bead or a carbonized grain of wheat. And a bronze arrowhead with a distinctive cast barb, the type that the Scythians had used. Salem Qatib had taught him all that.
Sitting in the dark, he cried. Once he started, he couldn’t stop, and it went on and on, because too many bad things had happened. He wanted out. He needed to find Salem.
2
Acco
It was after midnight when Rashid emerged from the tunnels under Acco. He left by way of new digs into the crusader city; they were unguarded and had opened new routes to the surface for him. One came up just outside the north walls, close enough to the sea that he had to wade the last few yards through water filthy with refuse in his wavering flashlight. He washed as soon as the water looked clean. Then he picked his way along the stone shoring intended to keep ancient Acco from washing into the Mediterranean until he passed the walls and entered the industrial zone to the north. There he climbed up into the over-lit modern night and squelched his way to a bus stop. By the time a bus came, he was nearly dry. Neither of the two passengers gave him a glance.
He was going to the apartment of Salem’s girlfriend. He didn’t like her, but he had nowhere else to go. She would tell him what had happened. She would know where to find Salem.
Even his feet were almost dry by the time the bus dropped him a few meters from her apartment, a heavy building with too much concrete and too little glass. From the street, he could see a paid security guard in the lobby. He had been here before, many times. Salem had virtually lived in her apartment after he met her.
He walked around the building, hungry, thirsty, and every time he slipped his side gave a pulse of pain like a knife-jab. Yesterday, or perhaps two days ago, he had had everything a man his age could want—a job, a place to live, a wonderful friend—
Before he could start crying again, Rashid pushed himself up the steps and into the lobby. The guard did not raise his head from his Koran, and Rashid went by. The building had elevators that actually worked. Rashid hit the up button and waited. When the doors opened, he entered, panicked briefly when he saw a man coming up from the garage with him, and then made himself press the button for sixteen. The man smiled at him and then frowned at his shoes, good American basketball shoes now caked with filth and still damp.
“I got lost,” Rashid said.
The words hung in the air between them. Rashid knew immediately that talking had been a mistake. The other man looked away. The elevator came to a stop on twelve and the man got out, looking at Rashid as he left and then at the digital floor display as if to check where Rashid was going.
Rashid felt his hands begin to shake. He clenched them.
The doors shut.
Rashid was sure that the man intended to call the desk when he reached his apartment. If Saida refused to see him, he would be taken, perhaps handed over to the police.
The doors opened on an empty corridor. Rashid stumbled forward, rattled and apprehensive. Saida was a hard woman, but she wasn’t bad.
A slut, his mother said.
He got to her door, still confused about what to say when she answered, and knocked. He should have called before he came, but he had little money, and in movies, people could be traced by their cell phones. He knocked again, put his ear to the door and knocked as loud as he dared.
The elevator departed behind him with a loud hum and whir of hydraulics and pulleys. He listened to it as it ran all the way down to the lobby without stopping.
He knocked again.
She wasn’t home.
The stairwell was locked on the ground floor, he knew. He didn’t want to face the security in the lobby by going down the stairs.
The elevator was coming back up.
He tried to turn the handle of her door. Locked, of course.
He tried again, as if strength could break a lock. Suddenly, his apprehension turned to panic at the approach of the elevator and he put both hands on the knob and wrenched at it, throwing his weight against the door.
The knob suddenly turned freely, and he stumbled through and the door slammed shut behind him. He tripped and fell sprawling with a crash as loud as the slam of the door. His flailing hands found paper, clothes, pans—
The balcony light shone through the sliding doors at the end of a short hall. The floor of the entire apartment, bigger than the place he shared with his mother, was covered in papers and trash. Every item in every drawer, every sheet of paper, had been rifled and tossed on the linoleum.
The lock had been forced. That’s why he had got in so easily.
Two thoughts seemed to occur to him simultaneously: that whoever had done this might still be there, and that the lobby security might be coming up in the elevator, might enter and assume he had robbed her. The association of the two thoughts froze him on the floor.
The elevator ran and ran, a pulse-like vibration allowing him to count the floors.
It stopped. The doors opened. It was this floor; someone got out and walked swiftly up the hall, and then back down it. Rashid held his breath, sure, sure that it was the guard. Unable to move. With nothing between him and arrest but an unlocked door. The man moved and stopped.
And moved.
And stopped.
Rashid saw the guard’s feet under the door against the light of the outside hall. In his mind, he prayed. Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah.
Allah’s will was that the guard should walk on. He moved down the corridor a few more doors, stopped, and came back.
The elevator doors opened and closed again and the car began to move.
Rashid breathed.
What if she was here, dead? That was a foolish thought, born of fatigue and the alien landscape in which he suddenly found himself. It was like finding himself on the set of an American horror movie.
He couldn’t push it out of his mind. In movies, the dead person was always in the bathroom. The bathroom was the next room on the hall.
He wished he had a weapon. He forced himself to crawl to the light-switch and threw it. All the lights came on, revealing the destruction of Saida’s effects more cruelly than the hallway lighting had done. He peered into the bathroom and saw no body. Emboldened, he moved into the kitchen, found a clean glass on a paper on the floor, and drank her expensive bottled water from the refrigerator. He drank three bottles before he was done; then he ate a sandwich that was days old but tasted wonderful.
Saida’s absence left him with no options. No money, no place to go, no one to beg for help. But his brain began to run again, and the panic drew back to the edge of his consciousness.
He had to get out of this building.
He had to get money.
He had to find Salem, although it was increasingly clear to him that Salem was in deep trouble. Rashid knew he had found something—something wonderful. Salem could not hide his feelings from Rashid. And he had taken things from the dig—Rashid had seen them in a gym bag in Salem’s car.
The men beating Salem at the dig, pounding him with their fists and the flat of a shovel. Yelling abuse. Telling Salem he was a thief. And Rashid, Salem’s loyal friend, had run away and hidden in the old tunnels under the city.
He went into the bedroom. The epicenter of the apartment’s wreckage. He started to go through the piles of clothing the searchers had thrown on the floor.
Salem’s clothes were in a separate pile. Rashid dug into it for Salem’s Navy coat; he didn’t wear it in Gaza, where American sailors would hardly be popular, but he often wore it in Israel where the opposite was true. Up in the padding of the shoulders was Salem’s emergency stash. Salem had shown it to him, once, with a joke.
“It’s my fly-away money,” he had said.
A thousand dollars in American bills, crisp and neat. And a tiny hard rectangle that felt unfamiliar. Rashid pulled it out and tried to remember what it did. He took another swig of water and remembered. He was holding a flash card, the memory of a digital camera. And Salem had hidden it.
He pocketed it with the money. He took the peacoat, because it was warm and dry and it was Salem’s. It made him feel taller.
He still had to leave the building. He poked through the rubble of Salem’s life with Saida and found a pair of his boots, rubberized duck shoes that Salem had seldom worn because, he said, they hurt his feet and were too hot. They fit poorly, but with the peacoat they made him look like a young man of means. They gave him the confidence to take the elevator and face the man at the desk.
As the elevator descended, he found he was calm. Perhaps too tired to feel more fear.
“She’s not home,” the guard said when Rashid emerged. The tone was on the edge of accusation.
“I know,” Rashid replied, walking steadily to the doors. Whatever the guard might have wanted to ask, Rashid kept going, volunteering nothing, a tactic that seldom failed him, until he was out on the street in the cold winter rain. When the guard finally opened her apartment, he, Rashid, would be the obvious suspect. Then the police would join Hamas in searching for him.
His life here was done. He was going to find Salem, and the place to look was back in the occupied territory. So be it. Rashid felt the crisp bills in his pocket and headed for a bus stop.
Naval Criminal Investigative Service HQ, Naples, Italy
“Aw, shit!”
Mike Dukas was looking at a message directing him to do something—urgently—and his people were already stretched thin and he didn’t have time for Mickey Mouse. His hand hit the phone.
“Dick,” he growled, “get in here.”
“Your wish is my, mm, suggestion.”
Dick Triffler was the ASAC—the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, NCIS Naples. He was a tall, slender African American with an oddly high voice and a manner so precise that he seemed to be doing an imitation of somebody—Clifton Webb, maybe, or William F. Buckley. He had worked with and for Dukas off and on for years and had always been eager to transfer someplace else; Dukas had been astonished, therefore, when Triffler had requested to be ASAC when Dukas had taken over Naples as Special Agent in Charge. Asked why, Triffler, who had been running his own long-term investigation on the West Coast, had said, “I thought I needed a challenge.”
Now Triffler came in, buttoning a black blazer over a blueon-blue striped shirt and a thick silk tie that, in an office where Dukas was wearing an ancient polo, made it look as if the Prince of Wales was visiting a homeless person. “You rang?” Triffler said as he sat down, pulling one knife-creased pant leg over a knee.
“I got a Rummygram telling us we urgently got to get the closeout details on some poor ex-Navy bastard who died in Tel Aviv. What the hell, is this any way to run a war on terrorism?”
“What war on terrorism?”
“The one we’re waging twenty-four-seven throughout the universe. Isn’t that what all this paperwork is about? Jesus Christ, I’ve got five drunken sailors in foreign jails, three sex abusers, a phantom shitter on the Fort Klock, and we’re supposed to be looking under the beds for al-fucking-Qaida! Now I’ve got to scrape up somebody to do scut work in fucking Tel Aviv! Let the naval attaché do it!”
“You’re venting again. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it—to listen to you vent. As you know, naval attachés have better things to do, like looking for a good place to have lunch, and dealing with dead sailors in foreign places is our charge.”
Dukas sighed. “Well—yeah, it’s our business—so who’s near Tel Aviv? The Jefferson’s already in the Canal. Athens office is too busy. We got anybody who can take a day and go?”
Triffler’s laugh was deliberately false. “How about Al Craik? He’s in Tel Aviv even as we speak.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Your wife told my wife.”
Dukas stared at him, stuck his lips out, raised an eyebrow. “That’s some network you got—two wives. You ever think of going into intelligence?”
Triffler stood—an impressive unfolding of long-boned limbs. “Am I done being vented at? You get in touch with Al.”
“You giving the orders now?”
“Somebody has to do it.”
Dukas scowled at his retreating back and then put out his hand for the phone and called Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, to ask where Commander Craik was staying in Tel Aviv.
Washington
In the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) mint-new Office of Information Analysis, the workday went on longer even than in the White House. The atmosphere of the place was that of a great business enterprise at the top of its game—buoyant, aggressive, determined, and overworked.
For a thirty-five-year-old named Ray Spinner, the place was salvation. He’d got bounced from the Navy for passing privileged information to his power-lawyer father; Dad had placed him in OIA to make it up. Now, Spinner reeled through his workdays in a frenzy half joy and half terror (Could he measure up? Could he be hardline enough? Did he dare to ape the bosses and wear power suspenders?). It was better than the Navy had ever been, but scary.
Sitting in a cubicle among twenty other cubicles, he was watching a message come up on his computer. New data came first to people like him; he knocked out the obvious bullshit and passed the rest up the line. The criteria had little to do with either authenticity or reliability and everything to do with usefulness to the office’s main goal—just then, getting something going in Iraq. He had already made the mistake of knocking out a report from a defector who said he had overheard a third party say that sarin gas was being manufactured nights and weekends in a Baghdad elementary school; it had been made very clear to him that this was precisely the kind of intelligence that was wanted, and if he made the same kind of dumb-nuts mistake again, he’d find himself handing out towels in the men’s room.
Spinner therefore really bore down now. The bit he was looking at struck him as a no-brainer—forwarding of a Tel Aviv police department memo about some dead A-rab.
Yarkov District police tonight reported death of Salem Qatib, Palestinian, resident West Bank. Held US student visa 1994-95, ex-US Navy reserve.
Meaning that the informant thought the dead guy might be of interest because he had US connections. Wrong. The real question was, Was he a terrorist? Well, let’s see. Spinner brought up OIA’s own list, which was different from the CIA’s and the FBI’s and much longer, and he didn’t find Salem Qatib as a terrorist but did find him on the Purgatory list (“not in Hell, but nearby”) of people “tracked for conflate background”—that is, for combining at least two suspicious factors. Like being Palestinian and having served three years in the US Naval Reserve.
As a cryptologist.
Hey, whoa!
Cryptologists had high security clearances and were tracked for years after they left the service because they had had access to sensitive stuff—codes, for example, that might not be changed for a long time. So Qatib must have been tracked, and he appeared to be clean, but OIA still had him on the conflate list because Palestinian plus cryptology equaled possible spy, right?
So. It wouldn’t do to make another mistake. Which he could do either by bumping this one up the line (but the word was that the White House was tired of the Palestinian problem), or by killing it (but maybe there was a secret interest in Palestinians that he didn’t know about).
Naval Reserve. That meant that the Navy would have to do a red-tape write-off—certify that the guy was dead, close his files, tie up all the loose ends of debts and pensions and all the other petty crap that the bean-counter mind could think of. So who did that?
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, that’s who.
Nearest office to Tel Aviv? Athens. He looked at the Athens roster, didn’t recognize any names—Spinner liked to deal with friends—and noted that Athens was actually under NCIS Naples, so looked there. And my God, Mary, look at that—the Special Agent in Charge, Naples, was an asshole named Mike Dukas!
Spinner grinned.
Mike Dukas had been the prick who’d got him read out of the Navy.
So Spinner forwarded the Qatib report to Michael Dukas, SAC NCIS Naples, blind-copied to his own boss at OIA, with the terse order, “Check implications anti-terrorism and terrorist connections and report back ASAP.” He put the name of OIA’s head at the bottom—a stretch, but permissible. He sent it Urgent.
Up yours, Dukas. He could just see the overweight, glowering, blue-collar Dukas hunched over the message, trying to figure out why he’d been told to jump, and to jump urgently.
Spinner grinned. He stood, stretched, looked over his cubicle wall at a guy going by wearing red suspenders. Yeah, he’d look drop-dead good in those.
Tel Aviv
Alan Craik was sitting on a hotel-room bed, a telephone in his hand. His wife, mostly naked, came out of the bathroom and turned, her back to him, to rummage in a suitcase. He grinned at her back. “Sexy buns.”
On the telephone, a voice barked, “Dukas.”
“My God, you mean I was holding for you? If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have waited.”
Rose ran back toward the bathroom, an irrelevant nightgown fluttering from her shoulders.
“I got a favor I want you to do me.”
“The answer is no.”
“No, the answer is yes. There’s nothing to it; it’ll give you something to do in Tel Aviv while Rose shops.”
“How the hell’d you know where I am?”
“Rose talked to Les a couple days ago. Les talked to Triffler’s wife. You can’t have secrets, man.” Les—Leslie—was Dukas’s new and pregnant wife; she and Rose were pals. “Anyways—”
“Yeah?”
“This is strictly routine—I gotta have somebody from the Navy get a death certificate. A guy died, ex-Nav. Find out what the story is, blah-blah-blah. Anybody could do it.”
“Get anybody.”
“There isn’t anybody! Look, the guy died; we gotta make it possible to close out his file, notify next of kin, all that. Just do it, will you?”
“Meaning what?”
“Piece o’ cake.” Dukas told him where to go in Tel Aviv—the main police building on Dizengoff Street—and the victim’s name—Salem Qatib.
“That’s an Arab name.”
“Palestinian.”
“Mike, a Palestinian who’s ex-US Navy?—in Tel Aviv—?”
“Just do it, will you? Fax me the death certificate and anything else you get. And don’t overdo it—forget you’re an intel officer and just be my errand boy. I’ll fax the dead guy’s paperwork to the embassy.”
He would have objected, but Dukas had hung up and his wife came out of the bathroom, and when she saw his face, she said, “Now what?”
Bayt Da Border Crossing, Gaza
Rashid spent the bus drive across Israel handling his papers and his Israeli passport, and imagining how he might handle the border crossing. He was dirty—even his eyes felt dirty—but the other passengers going to Gaza weren’t much cleaner.
When he had worked on the site, it had been easy, because he had been in Salem’s car and Salem had a work permit—bogus, in that it mis-stated Salem’s reasons for being in Gaza, but real enough and issued under the seal of the Palestinian Authority. Salem knew how to get such things.
In two hours of tired worry, Rashid concocted a simple story to cover his visit; a girl he had met in Acco, the need to see her again. True enough, if he substituted Salem for the girl. He rehearsed his story to himself, staring at his passport and his travel documents, until the bus slowed to a stop in the morning line at the border crossing. The bus was half empty. Rashid felt alone, and his anxieties were pushed into his stomach and his limbs. He had to put the passport down because it showed the trembling of his hands.
The bus inched forward in the line, surrounded by barbed wire and graffiti-covered concrete, steel reinforcement rods rusting away in long brown streaks. The stink of leaded gasoline fumes filled the air around him, came in through his open window and bit at his throat.
Before they reached the checkpoint, armed Palestinian Authority security men came on to the bus. One of them took the passenger list from the driver and read through it. Another, younger, officer checked through the documents that passengers had; passports, work permits, sometimes only letters from a possible employer and an identity card.
The man with the passenger list made a call on his cell phone. The bored young man with an AK on his back flipped through Rashid’s Israeli passport.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“Acco.”
“Purpose of your visit?” he asked, looking carefully at Rashid’s travel documents.
Rashid hadn’t seen him ask anyone else these questions, and he started to tremble again. “I’m—I’m going to see a—girl.”
The man laughed. He was only a little older than Rashid.
Rashid relaxed a little, and then the man with the passenger list pointed at him. “Rashid Halaby?” he said.
The younger guard nodded, held up Rashid’s passport.
“Take him.”
Tel Aviv
Dressed and waiting for his wife, Alan Craik was thinking not of her but of how thoroughly their world had changed since September eleventh. He was not thinking in sequence, not being rational or logical, rather letting his mind leapfrog from idea to idea; in fact, there was no logic, only the sequence of time itself, certainly no meaning. September eleventh obsessed his world, but he was oddly not quite of it: he had been on an island in the Gulf of Oman on September eleventh, miles from a television set, and he had not seen those images as they had burned their way into the world’s consciousness. He saw them later, to be sure; he had been shocked, saddened, angered, but he had missed the raw outrage—and the fear—that had gripped so many people. The difference was that he had not seen the horror live on television:
The island was rocky scrub and sand. There were goats, lots of them, many apparently wild. People walked into and out of this landscape as if passing from another reality into his and then out again. The sky came down like gray, hot metal and the sea, a smell wherever he went, was rarely visible. He was doing the red tape on the setting-up of a Navy sonar station, a job that could have been done and done better by a lieutenant with some sonar experience, but he was out of favor at Fifth Fleet, out of favor with the new flag and the new flag captain. The flag captain had said that there was no place for him there anymore and they’d expedite a new duty station for him but they didn’t want him as their intel, didn’t want his kind, whatever that meant. But he knew what it meant: a risktaker, a man who thought that out on a limb was where intel was done best.
He was out at the site, watching the goats, the odd Bedouin. Nothing was happening. He was thinking that they didn’t need him there at all. Right at that moment, they didn’t need him anywhere. Then his cell phone rang and the world changed. It was Sully, a CIA security thug who was a bully but the right man to have if people started shooting at you. Sully pushed people around verbally by saying the things that you didn’t say when the dynamics among people were fragile or explosive—sex, politics, religion—and now he said, the very first thing he said, “Al-Qaida just re-elected George Bush to a second term.” Then he had explained that a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and other passenger aircraft were missing and bad shit was going down.
The event had jerked him from the job at Fifth Fleet to one as a Temporary Additional Duty case officer at Central Command, Qatar. He had been twice to Afghanistan since then, three times to Kuwait, once to Pakistan, once to Iran, all in the four months since that remarkably, perhaps fantastically, lucky, successful, outrageous al-Qaida hit. He had gone from vengefulness to resignation, then to a kind of skeptical sadness.
“Penny?” Rose said.
He took her hand. “I was thinking that al-Qaida did things right, and we’re going to do things wrong.”
“Still chewing on it.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to go rushing back to a squadron to throw myself at bin Laden, if that’s what you mean.”
She’d been really hurt, he knew, by bailing out of the astronaut program. The Navy had lost some of its zest for her; he thought that it was that loss that had let her get pregnant again, driven her, maybe, back on her kids and on him. “There’ll be plenty of time to go to a squadron,” he said. “Years.”
“Another war, you think?”
“Oh, yeah. Lots of them.” He stood up, kissed her. “Bin Laden has arranged our futures for us.”
“We make our own futures.” She believed in self-determination.
“I thought so until this happened, but now—” He shook his head. “I keep wanting to look up to see who’s jerking my strings.” He straightened his clothes, pulling on himself as if he were rearranging his body, and they went to the elevator. He told her, in a different, heavier voice, that he was going to run Dukas’s errand while she shopped for presents for their kids. “I’m going there now and I should be done by two, and we’ll have a late lunch and then I’ll mosey over to the embassy and arrange to have them send the stuff to Mike.”
“I want to see a movie. Let’s go to a movie.”
“In Hebrew? Anyway, I’ve seen Harry Potter as much as I can stand.”
“It might be more interesting in Hebrew.”
On the street, he warned her for the third or maybe the fifth time of what to look for to avoid car bombs; he told her to duck if anybody started shooting, because half the crowd in any given spot would be armed; he told her to be careful of the baby. She told him he was a fuss-budget and she loved him and she’d see him at two o’clock.
He was back to thinking about September eleventh. “Everybody’s scared here,” he said. “Scared people scare me.”
Naples
Mike Dukas flicked a paper across his desk to Dick Triffler. “What the hell is an Office of Information Analysis?”
Triffler studied the paper. “It’s a secret office in DoD to do an end run around the intel agencies.”
“What the hell?”
“Folks who don’t like it call it the Office of Intellectual Paralysis. Folks who do like it think it’s the latest thing in what they call ‘intelligence reform,’ which means doing the Alley Oop around worn-out old shitkickers like the CIA, the FBI, and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. We are, and I think I quote, ‘tired, old, liberal, and nitpicking.’ It’s do-it-yourself intel.”
“How come you know all that and I don’t?”
“I read The New Yorker.”
“Some secret.”
Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”
“I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”
Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”
“No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”
“I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”
“Sounds right.”
“Check it out, will you?”
Triffler sighed. “If I say ‘Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”
“No time.”
Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.
“Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”
“My word for it would be ‘elegant.’”
“Your wife is so lucky.”
“Tell her that.”
“Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”
“There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”
“This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”
“You’d win my undying gratitude.”
“That your best offer?”
“At this distance, I’m afraid so.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.
“What’re you offering, chickie?”
“Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”
He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”
She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.
“You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”
“Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”
The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta lick to pry loose a list of folks in some shithouse called the Office of Information Analysis?” he said.
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv is a city of beautiful women and ugly architecture; the first make up for the second. Craik found it a pleasure to walk.
The police station on Dizengoff Street was on a par with the city’s other buildings, but at least it looked as if being a cop was a good thing—clean, solid, windowless. The entrance didn’t invite you in but announced that going in, with the right credentials, would be easier than getting out with the wrong ones.
He showed his passport and his part-timer’s NCIS badge. “Commander Craik, US Navy. About the death of Qatib, Salem.”
The policewoman at the inquiries desk spoke better Hebrew than she did English, but she wrote some things down and got on a telephone. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes detective was looking Alan over and probably realizing that he wasn’t armed—Alan, like most of the men in Tel Aviv, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks—while Alan was looking him over and deciding that the extra tuck on the right side of his shirt covered an in-the-waistband holster, and his slightly cocked left foot might suggest an ankle gun.
People went by as if they were heading for a somber event, heads down, moving fast. The space was big, harshly echoing, lighted with banks of fluorescents overhead; the noise of footsteps was like some sort of clattering engine. Move, move, the noise, the atmosphere seemed to say; get in and get out, don’t linger, we’re serious here.
“Commander Alan Craik?”
The man was blond, chunky, purposely likable. He had a Browning nine-millimeter in a very visible shoulder holster and he smiled as if he really was glad to see Alan. Maybe he was simply glad to see anybody who would allow him to strike an item off his to-do list. “Detective Sergeant Berudh.”
They shook hands. Berudh led him toward a bank of elevators, one hand behind Alan’s left arm; he was chattering about the building—how big it was, how many different offices it housed, how many crimes they covered a day. “You’re US Navy,” he said abruptly. “Not from a ship, I think.”
“No, not from a ship.” Habit kept him from saying where he was stationed just then. Which was absurd, of course, because the Israelis would already know. And they were allies. More or less.
Berudh was silent in the elevator, surrounded as they were by worried-looking people who were certainly not police. The elevator smelled of nervousness, Alan thought. Then two young women got on, smiling, bouncy, and chattered as the elevator rose. They worked there and seemed to say, “What is there to be nervous about?”
“Only the police are at home in a police station,” he said when they got off.
“And why not? Everybody’s guilty about something.” Berudh led the way down a corridor. “Most of them are here for permits, licenses, getting papers stamped, but they feel guilty. Actually, it makes the job easier.” He held a door open. “You’re NCIS?”
Alan explained that he had a badge but it was left over from earlier duty. “The special agent in charge of NCIS, Naples, asked me to do this for him.”
“Scut work,” Berudh said and gave him the smile. Berudh spoke American English with a slight accent, clearly knew American slang. “We work with NCIS when there are ships in Haifa, stuff like that. Sailors come down here, get in the usual trouble sailors do, we have to arrest them, blah-blah-blah. But we’re all friends.”
He was leading Alan through a room that had half a dozen desks in it, fluorescent lights overhead, a computer on each desk and a man or woman working at each one. More guns were in evidence here, some hung in their holsters on chairbacks.
“Okay.” Berudh sat behind the only empty desk, pulled a metal chair over for Alan. He offered coffee or tea or soda, told a quick joke, surprised Alan by asking to see his ID. “I know you ID’d yourself at the door and at reception, but it’s a rule. Death is serious business, isn’t it?” He looked over the passport and the badge, made some notes, and sat back. “Okay.”
He had a thin pile of photocopies and computer printouts. He began to hand them across the desk, naming each one as he did so—“Initial contact sheet—log sheet—physician’s report—death certificate—telephone log, that’s only to show when we notified your embassy—” The pages were clean, all typed, neat, efficient, but in a language Alan couldn’t read. Berudh explained that Qatib, Salem, had begun his police connection as an unidentified corpse in Jaffa, another of Tel Aviv’s sub-districts, then been logged in as a homicide, then identified from missing-person calls placed by his family.
Alan could have taken the papers then and left, but a perverse sense of duty made him ask questions he wasn’t at all interested in. “How come if he was found in Jaffa, you’re handling it here?”
“Question of internal politics.” Berudh made a face. “Yarkov District claims control over all cases of wrongful death. Not that we handle them all. Our homicide people are very territorial.”
“How long had he been missing?”
“Unh—” Berudh half-stood and leaned over to look at Alan’s pages. “You’ve got a page from our missing-persons log—it’s small type, very dense—” Alan held up a page; Berudh squinted at it and said, “I think the first call came in about eleven p.m.” Berudh rattled through a translation of the missing-persons page: a woman’s voice had made the first call, identified herself as a girlfriend; the victim hadn’t turned up for dinner at his cousin’s. They looked at the physician’s report. The man had been dead an estimated seven to twelve hours when the doctor had examined him.
“But no autopsy,” Alan said.
“No, no, no. Arabs are against that.”
“Can I see the body?” He hoped the answer was no.
“We released him to the family pretty much as soon as the doc was through with him. Off to the West Bank.” Berudh raised his hands. “Coffin was closed.”
Something pinged in Alan’s brain but didn’t quite connect, and he said lamely, stalling until the connection was made, “You don’t have a suspect.”
“At this point, no. Mugging? Girlfriend? Palestinian infighting?” He shrugged. “This guy was in your Navy, but a Palestinian can be into anything. Hamas, Fatah—he could have had a suicide belt stashed someplace, chickened out, got punished. They’re all fanatics.”
Alan signed a paper that said that he had in fact received all the stuff in his hand, and Berudh, smiling again, gave him a dark blue plastic folder with something in Hebrew on it and TLVPD in English in white letters. “It’ll keep them neat; they blow in the wind, you know; we always have a breeze, it’s the sea—that’s Tel Aviv, my friend, the Fort Lauderdale of the eastern Med—” He was seeing Alan to the elevator, explaining twice how to get out of the building, assuring him that if there was anything, anything he could do—and was gone.
In the vast lobby, assaulted again by the clatter of echoes, Alan crossed among the worried people heading for the elevators and looked with relish at the thin slice of the outdoors that showed through the guarded entrance. Guilt. Even when you weren’t guilty of anything, you felt it. He thought of September eleventh: Yes, it’s guilt, as if I could have stopped it. Which was nonsense.
It was at that point that his brain made the connection he’d missed earlier. According to the two-page file Dukas had faxed him—Qatib’s short personnel record and an ID sheet—he had had family in the States. But the body, Berudh had said, had been sent to the West Bank. Maybe the family had moved back? Or the parents had divorced and one had come back? Or—?
Instead of leaving the police building, ignoring Dukas’s plea not to be an intel officer, he went to the information desk and said to the same young woman, “I’d like to talk to somebody in Homicide.” Why hadn’t he asked to see Berudh again? he wondered. Because you check one source against another. He pointed at the signature on the first page in the blue folder Berudh had given him. “This person,” he said, figuring that one way in was as good as another.
3
Gaza City, Palestinian Authority
He wasn’t sure where he was—somewhere in the territories. The interrogation room smelled of mold. It was underground, the white paint on the walls peeled away from the concrete in long strips, exposing the rough surface beneath. It was too bright, lit by a pair of hot halogen lights, so that cockroaches threw sharp shadows on the floor where they scuttled.
Rashid had been waiting there for three hours. He had surprised himself by falling asleep. He had woken up to find that the persistent itching on his leg was an insect that had crawled up his jeans. He panicked, flailed around the room getting the unclean thing out of his clothes.
Then he sat, his arms crossed on his chest, and waited.
He heard steps in the hall, conversations, snatches of laughter, once, a startled scream.
More steps in the hall, sharper, and the click of a woman’s heels. His door opened.
There was a man and a woman. The man was middleaged, thin, smoking. The woman was younger, but not by much, wore heels and a short skirt.
Men with guns brought two chairs.
“I am Colonel Mahmoud Hamal and this is Zahirah,” the man said. “You are Rashid George Halaby?”
Rashid nodded.
“You know who I am?”
Rashid shook his head.
“Perhaps you have heard me called the Tax Collector. Hmm? I am responsible for the security of our Palestinian Authority in regard to antiquities. You work for Hamas?”
The question pierced through Rashid’s other fears; something to be dreaded, something for which he had not prepared an answer. So he said nothing, tried to keep his eyes down. He had heard of the Tax Collector. Salem had mentioned him—feared him, even.
“How long have you been with Hamas?” Colonel Hamal was looking at a manila folder.
Rashid looked at him with lowered eyes. The colonel was wearing a suit, had a silk tie, and a heavy gold ring on his finger. Rashid blinked to keep tears off his face.
The colonel waved the folder at him. “You are Rashid George Halaby. You live in Haifa. You run errands for Hamas. You had two brothers killed in the Intifada by Jewish soldiers. Your father died in Jordan in a riot. Your mother teaches at a Muslim school. Why not just say these things?”
Unbidden, Rashid’s eyes rose and met the colonel’s. The man smiled.
“You have an Israeli passport. As far as I can tell, you have never been arrested in Israel. Are you a Muslim?”
Rashid nodded.
“How do you come to have an Israeli passport?” the woman asked. Her voice was warm, her Arabic slightly accented.
“We live in Acco. Not Haifa.” Rashid spoke softly, as if he was afraid he might be overheard. They must know these things. Haifa was an Israeli town. Acco had a big Palestinian population, one of the biggest in Israel. “I’m a Palestinian.”
The man waved his hand, his attention still on the documents. “Acco, then. Either way, you are not from Gaza or the West Bank. You have an Israeli passport.” Hamal threw it on the table in front of the boy. “Why didn’t you proclaim it? I have no jurisdiction over you.”
Rashid couldn’t think of a reply. He couldn’t think at all. All answers were going to lead to the same place—Hamas, Salem, Hamas, Salem. Had he killed the man with the hammer? Did they know? He shrugged, the motion stiff. Rashid rubbed the back of his hand over his face, rubbed his lips. The arresting officers had not been gentle.
“What were you doing here?” Hamal paused for effect. “In Gaza?”
“Working. With a friend.” Rashid thought that sounded harmless, but both the man and the woman smiled.
“What were you working on?”
Rashid’s lips trembled.
“How long have you been with Hamas?” Hamal asked again.
“Since my brothers died.” Rashid answered savagely.
Hamal nodded. He smoked for over a minute. “You were working with a friend. Digging, perhaps?”
Rashid didn’t know what to say, because these people seemed to know so much. And he had no idea what they wanted. But after too long a hesitation, he said, “Yes,” softly.
The woman leaned forward across the table. “Is your friend Salem Qatib, Rashid?”
Rashid gave himself away with his reaction, and read it on them. But the mention of the name caused much of the fear to drop away. They were in it now. He raised his eyes, met hers. She was attractive; her eyes were big and friendly. She wore scent.
“Yes,” he said.
“How well do you know Salem Qatib?” Colonel Hamal asked.
Rashid squirmed. “We are friends.”
Hamal rustled his papers and glanced at his watch.
“He—he played with my oldest brother—when they were boys,” Rashid said.
Hamal didn’t look up from the dossier in front of him.
“Then—then he went away to—America,” Rashid said. “When he—Salem—came back, he came to visit my mother.”
The woman nodded her understanding.
Rashid went on, “He wanted to offer my brother a job, but Ali—was dead. So he took me instead.”
“Tell me about that job.” The woman leaned forward, and her scent covered the smell of mold and made the room a better place. It was not a smell of sex, but of flowers.
“We dug. For old things, antiquities.” Rashid knew he was committed now, had said too much, but their expressions didn’t change and he had nothing to lose. They were interested in Salem. So was he. “Salem would identify a site, and we would dig by hand. If there were things, then other men would come, but we would do the fine work.” Rashid tried to express the fine work by brushing the table with his fingers. “With a toothbrush? You know? And sifting. The other men would never sift, they wanted to use a backhoe for everything.”
“And Hamas told you to take the job.” Hamal was leaning forward too, his cigarette smoke cutting through the woman’s perfume. She waved at the smoke, but her eyes stayed with Rashid.
Rashid wrapped himself in his arms again and sat quietly. Because it was true, and because it was a betrayal of Salem before he even knew Salem.
“You had to, yes? Your mother would have asked you to do this work for them.” Zahirah sounded concerned. Perhaps she, too, despite her modern clothes, was a mother.
“They took care of us when my father died.”
“Of course. And you—what? You reported to them on what Salem found?”
Rashid put his face in his hands. He sobbed, “Not after we were friends! I—” he gulped air, swallowed the word loved. “We were friends.”
She nodded. Hamal leaned across her. “You were at the dig at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at?”
Rashid nodded. He could see the dig, the pit facing the sea, and everything covered with blue tarps against the winter rain. The row of burial urns that started them on the site. The stone structure nearest the sea that had electrified Salem.
“You were there when Qatib was beaten?” Hamal asked.
“I—ran.” The beach full of men. Salem kneeling, hit with a shovel. The bearded man he hit with a hammer.
Zahirah nodded. Hamal made a mark in the manila folder.
“Salem Qatib is an archaeologist, yes?” Hamal asked.
Rashid was still on the beach in his mind. His hands were shaking again, but his voice was steady. “He went to school in America.”
“He entered the Masters program in Archaeology and Ancient Studies at the University of Michigan,” Hamal said. “Which means that he is, in fact, an archaeologist. I would like to hear you confirm that, Rashid.”
“Yes, he is an archaeologist.”
“He is conducting an illegal dig.”
“Are there legal digs here?” Rashid surprised himself. But he wasn’t as afraid as he had been.
The woman, Zahirah, raised her carefully plucked brows. The man smiled, grunted a laugh. “Digs are legal if we license them. Hmm? And if not—then we seize them.”
Rashid looked at the table in front of him, because he now knew who had taken and beaten Salem. His sweat turned to ice, his relaxation vanished.
“You—” he began. He started again. “Where is Salem? Have you arrested him?” And he thought Do they know I hit the man with a hammer?
Hamal took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled to the side, away from Zahirah. “We seized the dig at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at. We do not have your friend Salem. Do you know that Salem Qatib was abducted that night? After my men took the site?”
Rashid put his hands out, grabbed the table as if he might slide off his chair. “No.”
“He was taken by Israelis, Rashid. Do you know anything about that?”
“No! No!” Rashid’s head went back and forth between them.
“And they killed him.” Hamal’s voice was brutal.
Rashid sat in shock.
Tel Aviv
Alan Craik and a woman detective named Miriam Gurion were sitting in a cubicle in the homicide detectives’ “room,” really a space big enough to play basketball in. She was in her late forties, he thought, her face lined by sun and wind, her hair gray. She spoke English well but with an almost-swallowed “r” that sometimes disappeared into her throat.
“How do you know I was lied to?” he said. He watched her eyes, which met his honestly enough but flicked away to each side; she had the head movements, too, of the watcher who is always checking the periphery. The watchfulness of a cop in a place where bombs go off. Or of a detective of homicide who thought the walls had ears.
“The 27-14,” she said. “The 27-14 is a routine piece of paper, but it has to be signed when we say it’s a homicide—and that’s my name on it, and in fact I signed it.” She leaned toward him over her messy desk and lowered her voice. “Two years ago.”
Behind her, three cat photos and five people photos were stuck to the cubicle wall; the people, he had already figured out, were the same two, young and older, one also in a wedding dress—her daughters?
“Let’s go for coffee,” she said.
“Yeah, but I don’t—”
“I don’t say another word in here.” She was almost whispering. She led him out a side door of the building to a sidewalk café a block away, not mentioning Salem Qatib or the paper or what she had meant by “two years ago.”
He ordered coffee, she a soda. While they waited, she lit a cigarette and puffed and simply shook her head when he tried to talk. She blew out smoke and he unconsciously waved it away. “Oh, you’re one of those,” she said and turned sideways to him, holding the cigarette low on her street side. The waiter put the coffee and the soda down between them and hovered, and she made a shooing gesture. When he was gone, she said, “Tell me about this detective who gave you the papers.”
“What’s your interest?” he said.
She grunted. “My interest is my job.” She puffed, exhaled out of the street side of her lips. “My interest is in living in a good country, where the cops don’t tell lies. This detective you talked to told you lies.”
He told her about Berudh, described him, his office. She said, “Mossad.” When he looked skeptical, she said, “He has to be a Mossad liaison. We have to work with them, but they’re bastards. So they lied to you.” She got out another cigarette, played with a cheap lighter, said, “I didn’t want to say these things at Dizengoff Street. You understand. But faking a homicide file, that’s serious business.”
“You don’t know it’s faked.”
She sighed. She held out her hand. He didn’t get it. She moved the hand impatiently, then lit her new cigarette, put the hand out again. He gave her the blue folder with the papers Berudh had given him.
Miriam Gurion opened the papers on the café table and put her head low over them as if she were near-sighted. She smoked and turned pages, separating them into two stacks. “This is bullshit,” she said. “You believe in feelings? I get bad feelings.” She stubbed out the end of the cigarette and burrowed for another in her huge handbag. With her head, she indicated one of the piles she had made. “These papers, you see them? They’re authentic—I know, because they’re from a case I had two years ago. That’s what I meant, I signed the 27-14 two years ago—these are all from another case.” She touched the other pile. “These are new, mostly dreck. See, your Berudh or somebody dug out my old case, probably scanned the file into a computer, printed it out, blocked out the name and the date, typed in new ones, rescanned—and here we are! A nice case file on somebody named Qatib, Salem, to give to the nice American officer who only wants to get it over with so he can go home. Eh?”
She lit a new cigarette and leaned back, smoking, her eyes on the street, and then she said without looking at him, “I don’t believe this crap about your guy, what’s his name—Qatib—being taken to the West Bank for burial. The family is in the US, you said? So the burial story is bullshit. I think maybe so is the story about people calling him in missing; we’ll check this. Right now.” She got a cell phone from the overstuffed handbag. Alan figured there was a gun in there somewhere, too; could she ever find it if she needed it? She punched in numbers, said to him, “I think we need to work together.” Then she was barking Hebrew into the cell, touching new numbers, making another call.
When she was done, she threw the phone into the handbag’s open maw and stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “The file on my two-year-old case is checked out from storage. Okay? Also, there’s nothing in the missing persons log for any calls last night about Qatib, Salem.” She put a hand on one pile of paper. “All bullshit.”
“Okay. Why?”
“You tell me, darling.” She blew out smoke. “What a bloody mess! I’m going to have to open a file, new case, plus file a complaint against your Berudh, plus I got no body—” She sat back and puffed, then looked at the papers she had said were from her old case and said, “Maybe we go find a body.” Smiled.
“Qatib?”
Her open hand, turned upward, floated over the table. “Why do they pick my case to do their faking? Chance? No. Something against me? No. Then why? Very fast work, darling, doing all this between about midnight and this morning. So they pick my case because a lot of the work is done for them already, nu?” The hand closed into a fist. She laughed. “Two things: somebody knew my old case, remembered it, and maybe there was a connection. Like the same people found the body? Or turned it into a body? Mmm?” She ground the cigarette into her saucer. “Let’s take a ride to Jaffa.”
The coffee was terrible, and Alan didn’t mind leaving the café, but he didn’t get it. “What’s in Jaffa?”
She waved the waiter toward her and scrambled in her bag for money; Alan was late in reaching for his own. “Two years ago, a body was found in an old military barracks there. He was young, Palestinian. I got the case. Mossad waved me off when I seemed to be getting somewhere. Now that case file is being used for the body of another young Palestinian. And here is Mossad again.” She stood. “Maybe Qatib, Salem, ended up in Jaffa.”
He looked at his watch. He had only an hour until he was supposed to meet Rose. Dukas had told him not to behave like an intelligence officer. He’d done enough. “I think I’d have to have more to go on than that.”
She gave him a look that might have been disgust and then sat again and got the cell phone out. She did the numbers, held up a finger, eyebrows arched, as if saying Watch what I’ll pull out of my ass now! She waited, sighed, jerked upright and began to bellow Hebrew into the phone. Then she listened, said something that sounded awfully like the Hebrew for bullshit and closed the phone with a distinct, though small, bang. “He’s pissing his drawers, he’s so scared!”
“Who?”
“The guy, darling, the guy who runs the place in Jaffa where they found the body two years ago! He knows something, and I scared the piss out of him! Are you coming or not?”
He felt as if hands were dragging at him to pull him down into his chair, but he stood and said, “Let’s go,” which was not what he wanted to do at all.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
