The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  HISTORY

  Following the defeat of the Third Reich, the UAS spearheaded a plan to partition Germany into two states, one Jewish and one Christian . . . The same 1948 act of Congress that officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty also established a new religious district in Jerusalem, Palestine and guaranteed Israeli citizens access to the holy city through special visitor visas. (In the aftermath of the 11/9 attacks, new security restrictions were placed on these visas; see the 2002 Arafat-Abbas Amendment to the Law of Return . . .)

  Both Israel’s existence and its geographical location remain controversial . . . British Prime Minister David Irving is only the most recent of Europe’s leaders to call for the Jewish state’s destruction . . . Meanwhile, many North American evangelical Christians would like to see the Jews permanently relocated to the site of the historical Land of Israel, believing this to be one of the necessary preconditions for the End of Days . . .

  Despite recent tensions, the UAS continues to be Israel’s closest political and military ally, with the two countries operating as partners in the War on Terror . . .

  Sinbad’s real name was David Cohen. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Mossad agent who’d done two tours as a commando in the Israel Defense Forces—a good man to have around, Samir joked, if you needed to kill a roomful of bad guys using only a rolled-up newspaper. Or if you needed to seduce a roomful of women—for in addition to his combat skills, David Cohen had been blessed with the good looks and charisma God usually reserves for pop stars.

  Mustafa and Samir had met him several years ago at an international security conference in Cairo. Samir, who was in the midst of a divorce, had gone clubbing with Cohen every night in hopes of being a secondhand beneficiary of his attractiveness; Mustafa had skipped the discotheques but listened dutifully to Samir’s tales of their adventures.

  On the last day of the conference, Mustafa and Samir were called away to a terrorist incident unfolding just blocks from the conference site. Cohen tagged along.

  The “terrorist incident” turned out to be a robbery gone bad. Five masked men had held up a bank, only to be caught in traffic as they tried to make their getaway. When police surrounded their stalled car, the men had opened fire, and in the ensuing gun battle one cop and two of the robbers were killed. The three surviving bandits had retreated on foot into a small movie theater, taking the patrons hostage. Homeland Security had been alerted after the bandits, claiming to have explosives as well as guns, threatened to blow up the building unless their demand for safe passage was met.

  When Mustafa, Samir, and Cohen arrived on the scene, they found the local AHS chief, Hamid Darwish, poring over a set of blueprints. Darwish, a political appointee who’d gotten his job through party loyalty rather than strategic acumen, had decided to end the standoff by pumping gas into the theater’s ventilation system.

  “Tear gas?” Mustafa asked.

  “No, something much better,” Darwish replied. “Something I’ve been wanting to try . . .” He pointed to a pair of his subordinates who were unloading several large canisters from the back of a van. Each canister was stamped with a lengthy chemical name and bore numerous warning labels.

  Mustafa wasn’t familiar with the chemical, but David Cohen was. “It’s a sleep agent,” he said. Looking at Darwish, he added: “You’re an idiot.”

  “Who is this person?” Darwish demanded.

  Cohen introduced himself, then explained why the plan was madness: Even if the bandits and their hostages all weighed the same amount and shared identical metabolisms, there was no way to ensure that they’d inhale the gas at the same rate. “Some will pass out while others are only numb—and if you pump in enough gas to make sure they all lose consciousness, you’ll kill some of them.”

  “We know what we’re doing,” Darwish said. “Besides, we have no choice—these men are desperate, and they say they’ve wired the building with dynamite.”

  “They’re lying. Why would they have dynamite?”

  “You ask that, and yet you call me an idiot?”

  “The whole point of robbing a bank in the daytime is that the vault is already open. These men don’t have explosives . . . and gassing them is stupid.”

  “Get this fucking Israeli out of my face,” Darwish snapped.

  “That was diplomatic,” Mustafa said to Cohen, after he had, with difficulty, convinced him to back off.

  “That man’s as dangerous as those bank robbers,” Cohen said. “You have morons running things here.”

  “Yes, welcome to Egypt,” Samir said smiling.

  “The thing about morons,” said Mustafa, “is that they don’t respond well to being called morons.”

  “Ah, he wouldn’t have listened even if I’d been polite. He wants to use his stupid gas.”

  “And what would you suggest we use? Is there something better, something we can control the dosage of, maybe?”

  “Yes,” Cohen said. “Bullets.” He looked up the block, to where the Cairo SWAT team were cooling their heels around their own van. “Give me a minute . . .”

  The crowd of local and federal cops around the theater was growing, as more men from the security conference wandered by to see what was happening. Mustafa searched the crowd, trying to find someone reasonable who outranked Darwish.

  Samir tapped Mustafa on the shoulder. “Look up.”

  David Cohen, wearing a SWAT jacket and with a rifle slung across his back, was standing on the roof of the department store next to the theater. A broad alleyway separated the two buildings. Cohen took a running start and leaped across the gap. It was then, seeing how gracefully he sailed through the air, that Samir gave Cohen his nickname: “Hah! Sinbad the Jew!”

  Having landed safely on the theater’s roof, Cohen vanished from view. Moments later, gunfire erupted inside. The real SWAT team members came alive at the sound, but before they could do anything, Cohen called out on a walkie-talkie to announce it was all over.

  Two of the bank robbers were dead and the third had surrendered. None of the hostages were harmed. Darwish was furious. He had Cohen arrested as soon as he came out of the theater, and would have shot him if he could have gotten away with it.

  But within hours the situation changed, as the news spread that one of the freed hostages was Diala Mahfouz, the grandmother of Cairo’s mayor. The old woman had a weak heart, and while the excitement of Cohen’s impromptu commando raid hadn’t been great for it, gas would have been far worse.

  By nightfall Cohen had been sprung from the holding cell Darwish had put him in and was up on a stage with the mayor and other officials, being hailed as a hero in front of dozens of news cameras. Mustafa and Samir stood near the back of the auditorium where the press conference was held, Samir beaming as if he were the one onstage.

  “What did I tell you, Mustafa?” he said. “Is this guy cool, or what?”

  As they waited for Sinbad outside the Israeli embassy, Mustafa suffered an attack of vertigo. He couldn’t remember when these spells of dizziness had first started, but he’d had them off and on for at least the past few years. They came most often during moments of idleness: He’d be staring at the city skyline, or contemplating some perfectly ordinary street scene, and suddenly be struck by a powerful sense of dislocation. The last time, he’d been in Riyadh, about to step into a crosswalk, when he happened to notice that all the cars lined up at the red light were driven by women.

  This time it was the embassy flag that set him off. He heard it snapping in the breeze overhead and glanced up. The Star of David, fluttering proudly above Al Kindi Street, somehow made him aware of the earth’s rotation beneath his feet. He staggered backwards and might have fallen, if not for the support of a concrete barricade.

  “Are you all right?” Amal asked.

  Mustafa fingered the bandage on his neck. “I still need a bit of rest, I guess.”

  “Here he comes!” Samir said.

  Amal turned to look, and Mustafa, imagining he saw something in her express
ion, said, “Ah, you’ve been talking to Umm Dabir.” Umm Dabir was Farouk’s secretary. She’d met Sinbad during one of his visits and developed a not-so-secret crush.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Amal said.

  “I understand many of the women in the office are in love with him.”

  “Not just the women, apparently.” Amal nodded towards Samir, who’d already run up to embrace Sinbad and was now walking alongside him with an arm slung over his shoulders.

  “Hey, man, good to see you!” Samir was saying. “But what’s this about you already being in town and not calling us?”

  “No time to party this trip,” Sinbad said. “I’m due on a redeye to Berlin tonight . . . Hello, Mustafa.” He flashed a smile at Amal. “And you must be Mustafa’s new bodyguard.”

  “Yes, she protects me from Christians, and the lions of my own foolishness,” Mustafa said. “Amal bint Shamal, meet David Cohen. Sinbad to his many admirers.” As they shook hands, Mustafa took note of the attaché tucked under Sinbad’s arm. “You have something for us?”

  “I do,” Sinbad said.

  “Let’s find a place to sit, then. I’m feeling a little lightheaded today.”

  They went to a tea shop around the corner from the embassy. The proprietor greeted Sinbad as warmly as Samir had, and Mustafa felt his vertigo flaring again. But he felt better once he was seated with a steaming glass of tea in front of him, listening to Sinbad explain that Samir had been right—the two blond men in the photograph were German.

  “Peter and Martin Hoffman, of the Lutheran National Socialist Brotherhood,” Sinbad said, producing two Interpol files from his attaché. “Both alumni of the Munich Polytechnic. Peter is a chemist, Martin an engineer—but their main occupation, since graduating, has been organizing attacks on Jewish settlements in the Rhineland. Last year Peter was captured at a car-bomb assembly site in Koblenz. He killed a soldier and escaped. We think he and his brother fled to Turkey on forged guest-worker visas. From there . . .”

  From there, sneaking into the UAS would have been a relatively trivial exercise. Despite millions of riyals spent to secure the Turkish-Syrian border, it remained a popular route for undocumented European immigrants.

  “This is helpful,” Mustafa said. “But if they are in the country illegally, finding them won’t be easy.”

  “Ah, but there’s more,” Sinbad said. “I also ran a check on your dead suicide bomber, James Travis . . .”

  “Interpol has nothing on him.”

  “No, but Mossad does. Two summers ago, Travis was part of a humanitarian mission in the Rhineland that was detained, briefly, on suspicion of providing aid and comfort to terrorists.”

  “What sort of humanitarian mission?” Amal said.

  “Medical,” Mustafa guessed. “He was a student doctor, remember?”

  “Yes,” Sinbad said. “And one of the other doctors detained with Travis was an American named Gabriel Costello.” He opened up his attaché again. “I think you’ll recognize him.”

  The photo attached to the new file he handed them was full-face rather than profile, and the subject looked somber rather than angry, but there was no mistaking the red hair.

  “This is an ICE file,” Mustafa noted. “How did you get—”

  “It’s not important,” Sinbad said. “What matters is, Dr. Costello has a green card . . . and a Baghdad address. I looked it up, it’s an apartment in the western suburbs, near the airport.”

  Directly beneath Costello’s home address, the file listed his current occupation and place of employment. “I don’t believe this,” Mustafa said. “He’s a trauma surgeon at Karkh General Hospital.” He explained to Sinbad: “That’s where I got patched up the other night. It’s just minutes from here. We should go over, see if Costello is working now . . .”

  “He’s not,” Sinbad said. “I checked that too. The receptionist I spoke with said Dr. Costello’s next shift starts at two p.m. So you have time to finish your tea.”

  Samir was beaming again.

  “You know, David,” Mustafa said, “if you wanted to skip that flight to Berlin tonight, I’m sure we have some other cases you could solve.”

  “Let’s see how this goes, first. I’m not interested in Costello, but if we can find the Hoffman brothers, maybe I’ll stick around.”

  By quarter to two they had plainclothes agents in place inside and outside the hospital. Half a dozen Baghdad police units, a bomb-disposal team, and a Hazmat crew were all on standby.

  Mustafa, Samir, and Sinbad were parked across the street from the hospital’s ambulance bay. Sinbad had offered the use of his embassy car as a mobile command post and Mustafa had accepted, thinking it would be more comfortable than the black van. Also—and this was somewhat embarrassing—the Israeli diplomatic corps, at least that part of it that was actually Mossad, had better communications gear than Arab Homeland Security did. Instead of juggling two sets of radios, Mustafa could use Sinbad’s dash-mounted system to monitor and transmit on both the AHS and local police frequencies.

  Amal was in the parking structure adjacent to the hospital, posing as a booth attendant. Mustafa had hoped that an unfamiliar woman in the booth would be less likely to raise suspicion, but this part of the plan was working too well: The doctors and male nurses arriving for the 2 p.m. shift were stopping to chat Amal up, creating a small traffic jam at the garage entrance. Some of the other agents began teasing Amal about her “new boyfriends”; then Abd al Rasheed, an older agent who’d re-embraced Islam in a big way after 11/9, came on air to berate them for the crudeness of their comments.

  “Enough!” Mustafa said, breaking into the transmission. “Peace be unto all of you, and knock it off! It’s almost two. Does anyone see our target?”

  “Mustafa?” a voice answered almost immediately. “This is Hamdan. I think we may have him. You said Costello drives a white motorcycle?”

  Mustafa glanced at Sinbad. “That’s our information, yes.” He recited a license plate number.

  “That’s the one. He’s here.”

  “Is he headed for the parking garage?”

  “He was. He just pulled over to the curb and checked his pager. Now he’s making a cell phone call . . .”

  Mustafa looked at Sinbad again and nodded hopefully towards the radio scanner. Sinbad shook his head.

  “Mustafa?” Hamdan said. “Do you want us to grab him?”

  Before Mustafa could answer, Abdullah clicked in from the hospital switchboard: “Mustafa, Costello’s on the line right now . . . He says he’s going to be late to work.”

  “Does he say why?”

  “Family emergency.”

  Mustafa took his finger off the transmit button. “Did I miss something in Costello’s file about relatives in Baghdad?”

  “No,” Sinbad said. “He’s got no family here. Nearest thing is a fiancée who got killed in Gaza City a few years back.”

  “So who paged him?”

  “Two guesses,” Samir said from the back seat.

  Hamdan: “Mustafa? The guy is on the move again. What do you want us to do?”

  “Follow him,” Mustafa said, making a decision. “Keep him in sight but don’t take him yet. He may be on his way to meet with the Hoffmans . . . Hamdan, do you copy?”

  An oath accompanied by the blare of a car horn erupted from the radio.

  “Hamdan?”

  “Ah, we’re stuck behind some idiot who won’t move . . . Costello was able to squeeze around. He’s turning south onto Union Boulevard.”

  Sinbad already had the car in motion. Thirty seconds later they too were on the boulevard, the white motorcycle visible a block ahead of them.

  “Everyone please pay attention,” Mustafa said into the radio. “Costello is southbound, approaching the July 14th Bridge. We want to see where he’s going, so I’d ask my friends in the Baghdad PD to please stay back with your sirens off. Anyone not driving a marked car, we could use your help with the pursuit. And can I get a helic
opter overhead in case we lose him?”

  Costello didn’t appear to be aware that he was being followed, but he was a naturally impatient driver willing to take chances, and Sinbad, whose car could not slip through the same gaps as the motorcycle, had to work hard to keep up with him. The bridge, where six lanes became four, proved a special challenge, but Sinbad managed to keep Costello in sight by means of several death-defying swerves into oncoming traffic.

  They crossed the river, coming onto the narrow peninsula formed by the sharp bend the Tigris made as it flowed south out of midtown. Baghdad University’s main campus occupied the peninsula’s western tip, and Costello headed that way. “Abdullah,” Mustafa said into the radio, “can you get BU campus security on the phone and have them stand by?”

  “Wait,” Samir said. “He’s pulling over.”

  They were on a commercial strip near the eastern edge of the campus. In the middle of the block was an Ali Baba supermarket with a Forty Thieves coffee shop tucked in beside it. Costello parked his motorcycle in front of the coffee shop. Two blond men sitting at a table on the sidewalk stood up to greet him.

  “Look at that, the whole gang.” Samir pounded Sinbad on the shoulder. “Dude, you bring good luck.” But Sinbad was less enthused. As Costello sat down with the Hoffman brothers, Sinbad pointed to a green knapsack under the table beside Peter Hoffman’s chair. “What do you suppose is in that backpack?”

  Mustafa said: “We recovered all the stolen explosives.”

  “All the stolen explosives from the army base,” Sinbad said. “But you can find explosives in a university engineering department, too. Or make them in a chemistry lab.”

  “So what do you suggest we do? Call in SWAT and have them loan you a rifle?”