Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “It is not a question of blood money, but justice,” the Doctor snapped. He stepped around the two and continued on behind Petra. Under a large skylight in the heart of the warehouse they came upon Mr. Hajji, bound hand and feet to a stanchion. “A monumental error has been made,” Mr. Hajji whispered when the two figures came up to him. He spoke as if he were letting them in on a secret. “There is absolutely no grain of truth—”

  The Doctor cut him short. “I know everything. If one word of deceit crosses your lips, I will execute the sentence that has been ordered for all Palestinians who collaborate with the Isra’ilis. Your only hope is to tell the truth and trust me to exercise the compassion ordained by the Qur’an for those who repent. Do you comprehend what I am telling you?”

  Mr. Hajji, his eyes fixed on the bruise disfiguring the Doctor’s forehead, nodded weakly. “Are you the mujaddid of whom they speak in the souk?”

  Petra murmured a verse from the Qur’an. “‘Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration.’”

  “There are those who say I am the Renewer,” the Doctor said. “Only time will tell.”

  “It is true I worked for the Jews,” Mr. Hajji cried. “They forced me.”

  “When did they recruit you?”

  “In the summer of 1997.”

  “How?”

  The story gushed out. “My son Ahmed was in prison near Tel Aviv. They threatened to charge him with the murder of a Jewish settler. They said only I could save him from a long prison sentence. They threatened to revoke the authorization of my son Sufian to cross the green line and work in Isra’il. Sufian’s wages supported him and his wife and his four children and his wife’s parents and the crippled brother of his wife’s father. The Jews threatened to spread rumors that I had already collaborated if I did not agree to collaborate.” Mr. Hajji groaned softly. “What was I to do? I have three daughters who require dowry. I have eleven mouths under my roof to feed. I had no choice.”

  The Doctor moved to one side of Mr. Hajji. “We shall feed them for you,” he said. “Do you believe in God?”

  “I do. I do. With all my soul.”

  “Turn your head toward the Kaaba at the heart of the holy city of Mecca, built by Ibrahim, the father of us all, and pray with me.”

  “I will. I will.”

  The Doctor reached out and touched Mr. Hajji lightly behind his left ear as if he were bestowing a blessing. “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe. You do we worship and call upon for help—”

  “Worship,” Mr. Hajji repeated, his dentures rattling in his jaw. “Help …”

  “Guide us along the Straight Path.”

  “Guide us—” Mr. Hajji faltered. Tears streamed down his weathered cheeks.

  “I assume from your name that you have made pilgrimage to Mecca.”

  Mr. Hajji managed a miserable nod.

  “Now you will make hajj to a better place than Mecca,” the Doctor said, feeling for the distinctive knob of bone behind the ear with the tips of the fingers of one hand, drawing the small pearl-handled pistol from the inside breast pocket of his jacket with the other. “As you approach, remember to shout, as the pilgrims to Mecca shout, I am here, O Lord, I am here!”

  “What place is better than Mecca?” Mr. Hajji almost choked on the question; he was terrified of the answer.

  “Paradise is better than Mecca. You have confessed yourself to me. Your confession is written in the Book of Deeds. On the Day of Reckoning, when the earth is ground to powder and those who have deviated become firewood for Gehenna, it will be recorded in your favor.” He raised the barrel of the pistol to the knob of bone. “If God knows of any good in your heart, He will give you better than what has been taken from you; surely God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”

  “Surely God—”

  The Doctor pulled the trigger. Mr. Hajji’s body jerked as if it had been struck by a bolt of lightning, then sagged into the ropes binding him to the stanchion.

  From the other end of the warehouse, the shrill yous-yous of a widow mourning the death of a husband echoed over the crates filled with oranges and apples and carrots and parsley.

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  I’m running late. Couldn’t be avoided. The Defense Department’s National Security Agency hawks came over to play at the White House this morning, after which I had to take an important conference call.

  The folks from NSA, as usual, brought along their favorite toy: dominoes.

  You heard right. Dominoes, as in the famous “domino theory” that provided Lyndon Johnson with the intellectual justification for upping the ante in his calamitous war in Vietnam. The National Security Agency trots them out when it wants to scare the trousers off everyone in the White House. I’m here to tell you, ten times out of ten it works.

  Who? Tell him to send me a memorandum. I’ll speak to him when I’ve had a chance to read it.

  Where was I?

  Dominoes.

  This morning’s session was held in the cabinet room. The President presided and the Administration’s top guns were present—the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the National Security Advisor and yours truly, Zachary Taylor Sawyer, the President’s Special Assistant for Middle Eastern Affairs. The NSA Director, a holdover from when Secretary Rumsfeld ran the Defense Department, set up his dominoes and began to knock them down, which is to say he explained what he thought would happen if the shooting started again in the Middle East. I stole a look at the President from time to time—she seemed to turn various shades of mauve. Who can blame her? Her desk is where the last domino stops. She doesn’t particularly like the idea of presiding over the end of the world as we know it.

  I admit it, I am exaggerating. But not as much as you might think.

  The week’s domino theory, according to the National Security Agency, starts with that Rabbi—I can never remember his name. Apfulbaum. That’s it. It starts with this Apfulbaum fellow being executed by his kidnappers. Then the ultra right-wing Israelis exact some sort of vengeance, at which point one of the crazy Palestinian fundamentalist cells that has gone to ground exacts vengeance for the vengeance. After which both sides cancel their plans to come to Washington and the Mt. Washington peace treaty goes down the drain.

  That was only the appetizer.

  The NSA analysts estimate there is a ninety percent chance that if the Middle East explodes again, the Saudi monarchy will not survive and Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Wahhabi fundamentalists, some of whom tend to be slightly to the right of that fellow who brought down the Twin Towers in 2001, Osama bin Laden. (Yes, I do remember his name, don’t I?) One quarter of the world’s oil reserves, the NSA Director reminded us—as if we needed reminding—are buried under Saudi sand. If Saudi Arabia went, we were told, the rest of the countries in the area would topple like the proverbial dominoes. Jordan, where the Hashemite Bedouins and their king rule the seventy percent of the population that is Palestinian, would be the first to go. Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, eventually even Algeria and Morocco, could follow. Do you realize what it would mean for the free world—for Europe and for us—if these vast reserves of oil and natural gas were controlled by Islamic fundamentalists? Imagine the resources they could commit to furthering Islamic revolution in countries with Islamic majorities. On any given day they could decide to pump a couple of million barrels less and the price would jump higher than it already has, leading to hyper inflation, leading to whole industries going bankrupt, leading to the collapse of stock markets, leading to panic in the streets.

  There was worse to come. It appears the Kremlin’s Americanologists are telling their counterparts in Washington that all of Muslim Central Asia would be destabilized if the Middle East question isn’t resolved. And the Muslim states in Central Asia—some of which still have nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles on their territory—in tu
rn would destabilize the entire Russian land mass. Think of the possibilities—Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan selling nuclear warheads to Gulf fundamentalists who are swimming in oil money. My god, September 11th would look like a fender-bender by comparison.

  You don’t have to be an NSA analyst to imagine how this might play out in the rest of the world. Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, even Turkey, could go fundamentalist. China, which has a large Muslim minority, especially the Uighurs in Central Asia, could wind up fighting a civil war with breakaway Islamic provinces. It wouldn’t take long for the Japanese, who import every drop of oil they use, to know which side their bread was buttered on. Oil producers like Russia and Venezuela and, eventually, even England, under enormous pressure to increase production to prevent the industrialized nations from becoming prisoners of the Gulf’s imams, would do so on condition they could hike their prices.

  Bleak? I’d say the picture was more black than bleak.

  All the while the President sat there, her high heels tapping on the floor, fiddling with a paperclip, contorting it into different shapes until it broke, at which point she started in on a new one. When the NSA Director finished, there was one of those thick silences that you can cut with a knife. Everyone in the cabinet room was staring at their finger nails. I became aware of the President’s eye on me. “You’re our in-house Middle East guru, Zack,” she said very quietly. “What do you make of all this?”

  I shrugged and said as far as I could see there was nothing new in it. I reminded them of the old proverb that existed long before the Washington whiz kids invented the domino theory. For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the rider was lost, and so on.

  “So you’re saying that the NSA scenario is on the money,” the President remarked.

  I raised my brows and murmured something (paraphrasing Will Rogers) about how an NSA analyst’s guess was as likely to be as good any anybody else’s.

  That was too much for the NSA Director’s boss, the Secretary of Defense, who leaped to defend his turf. “I assume the Special Assistant for Middle Eastern Affairs has a better take on the ticklish situation we find ourselves in,” he said.

  The President was gazing at me intently, as if to say: Do you?

  “Figuring out history before it happens,” I said tiredly, “is like trying to predict what route lava will take when it flows down the side of an erupting volcano.”

  The Secretary of State, true to form, attempted to identify the common ground in the discussion; once again the policy makers were eager to convey the impression that the highest level of government speaks with one voice. “If I’m reading Zack right,” he said carefully, “he’s telling us that the execution of I. Apfulbaum will bring on the equivalent of a volcanic eruption in the region. Which way the lava will flow—which is to say, how it will play out—is anybody’s guess.”

  I noticed the President’s chief of staff in the doorway tapping the crystal on his wristwatch, so I nodded in vague agreement and let it go at that.

  I was back in my office visualizing rivulets of lava coursing down the side of an erupting volcano when the urgent conference call from my counterparts at 10 Downing Street and the Elysée came through. Both of them were extremely agitated. (The timing of the call led me to suppose their respective intelligence services had circulated the NSA’s domino briefing.) They didn’t waste time on small talk. Their principals, they explained, which is to say the British Prime Minister and the French President, both held the view that the peace treaty must be salvaged, whatever the cost. I asked if they had any new ideas to offer on how this might be accomplished. A reasonably long silence followed, as if each was waiting for his vis-à-vis to deliver the bad news. The Middle East specialist from 10 Downing finally cleared his throat. “We are of the opinion that the Israelis should be made to cede to the logic of yielding to the demands of the kidnappers,” he announced. “Paris stands shoulder to shoulder with London on this analysis,” the Elysée specialist added. “Give them the goddamn prisoners in exchange for that Rabbi and his secretary, and let us get on with the signing ceremony and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked—as if I didn’t know, but I thought I would get them to spell it out for the record. “Why don’t you guys phone up the Israeli Prime Minister and tell him yourselves?”

  “We are of the opinion that it must be the American President who personally delivers the message,” the 10 Downing Street man said. “Only Washington has enough clout with the Israelis to make them heed the voice of sweet reason.”

  The Frenchman started to say something but I cut him off. “Don’t even go there, my friends. First off, the American President has climbed as far out on this limb as she plans to; another inch and she risks having popular opinion turn against her, which would mean an end to her hopes for a second term. More importantly, you can only push the Israelis so far; there are things they can’t be forced to do and exchange Palestinian prisoners for Jewish hostages is one of them. For the obvious reason that such exchanges only invite more kidnappings.”

  The Frenchman, whom I knew slightly from NATO brainstorming sessions, said, “You could raise the stakes, Zack. You said as much in your book Breaking Vicious Circles. You could threaten the Israelis—”

  I interrupted again. “Threaten them with what? Another Security Council resolution condemning Israel?”

  “The French would be ready to join an international move to isolate Israel—I’m talking about cutting off their commercial airline landing rights, I’m talking about freezing their overseas bank accounts, I’m talking about organizing a trade embargo the way we did years ago with South Africa.”

  “Escalate, that’s the ticket,” the man from 10 Downing, an old Foreign Office Janus known to be viscerally pro-Arab, heartily agreed.

  “And when the Israelis refuse to buckle, what do we do then? Mine Haifa harbor? Bomb Tel Aviv? Listen, gentlemen, this is not an idea I will raise in the Oval Office. Before you raise the stakes, it’s essential to have a sense of how far someone can be pushed. If you cross this line, you invite defiance.”

  They argued on for the better part of three quarters of an hour. I stood my ground. I knew it would be impossible to push the Israelis past where their finely honed national instinct for survival told them they could safely go. To try would be to lose whatever credibility you had when you threatened to raise the stakes. My counterparts in London and Paris were still functioning with an imperfect grasp of Middle East reality. One way or another, what was happening on the ground would educate them.

  You bet your socks, I’m still detached. But to tell the god-awful truth, I’m also scared. I understand why the Europeans are panicking. If we lose control of events, where oh where do we go from here?

  TWENTY-SIX

  SWEENEY WAS MIGHTILY PLEASED WITH HIMSELF. HALF A DOZEN colleagues from the international press corps had phoned over the past few days to congratulate him on the Shin Bet article; two of them had even interviewed him for the articles they were writing about his article. After all, it wasn’t every day that someone gave the world a glimpse of what went on behind the closed doors of the super-secret and super insolent Shin Bet. Dropping his cellular telephone into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket, wrapping an old college scarf around his neck, Sweeney pulled on a pair of ski sunglasses and climbed up to the roof-top terrace over his apartment. He had filed three hundred and fifty words on what appeared to be a Hamas-organized kidnapping of a member of a rival fundamentalist group in the Old City right under the noses of the Israelis and was going to unwind with the first dry martini of the day. The air was crystal clear and wintry. Light from the setting sun glinted off the gold leaf of the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount—the dome that sheltered the great boulder on which Abraham, according to Jewish tradition, came a hair’s breadth away from sacrificing his son, Isaac; from which Muhammad, according to Muslim t
radition, ascended to heaven on his steed el-Burek for his rendezvous with Allah. To the southeast, beyond the Church of the Dormition, Sweeney could make out the pale shroud of mist hovering over the Dead Sea, the lowest geographical point on the surface of the planet, and, behind it, the dark ashen hills of Moab. It was not surprising, he thought, that homo sapiens had been battling over Jerusalem for three thousand years. Some scholars attributed the city’s greatness to the lay of the land; the earliest settlement had been astride a caravan crossing and eventually grown into an important trading center. Others attributed the city’s strategic importance to the discovery of an underground spring, which guaranteed its garrison an endless reserve of drinking water. But gazing out now past the walls of the Old City, Sweeney knew where the greatness came from. The power of Jerusalem, the magic it worked on people, was first and foremost aesthetic; every time you saw it, it took your breath away.

  The cellular phone in Sweeney’s pocket bleated. He assumed it would be another reporter calling to compliment him on his Shin Bet article; to ask, facetiously, which plane he would be taking once the Israelis relieved him of his press pass.