The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  “The Last of Days,” he said, squeezing the pages when he was finished. “Khalil’s plan?”

  Ben nodded. “And the State Department seems certain that Latif was involved with Khalil and that his presence in this country was part of some operation. A big one.”

  Sayeed looked uncertain for the first time. “I know this boy. That’s ridiculous.”

  “The government knows him too. They don’t agree.”

  “They got you to do this by threatening me.”

  “You were Latif’s sponsor. That doesn’t look good, under the circumstances.”

  “So what did they promise you? To let me off? Not charge me with treason?”

  “They just want Latif. Apparently, he slipped off their radar.”

  Sayeed handed his brother back the now curled pages. “He had some problems and dropped out of school. That’s all.”

  “You’ve been in touch with him, then.”

  “I have his new address,” Sayeed said defensively.

  “You checked Latif out before agreeing to sponsor him, of course.”

  “I knew his mother had died of dysentery in a refugee camp and his father died of an Israeli bullet. I didn’t ask any other questions.”

  “That’s your procedure?”

  “He was a young Palestinian who required my help. First a victim of the Israeli government and now a victim of the American government.”

  Ben wanted to lash out at his brother, to scream at him, but he couldn’t. Besides, he knew it would do no good. He saw too much of himself in the slightly older man before him trying to lose himself in a car that would never be finished. Both of them headstrong and stubborn, swayed by their emotions even in the face of the most rational of arguments.

  “Why don’t we go pay Latif a visit?” Ben suggested. “So I can see for myself.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 15

  Y

  ou’re certain he’s here?” Danielle asked, as she and Colonel al-Asi approached the entrance to the refugee camp in Gaza.

  “Certain, Chief Inspector? No. In my world certainty is a relative term. Am I certain a single witness survived the assault on Akram Khalil’s stronghold? Yes. Am I certain he is now desperate for sanctuary? Absolutely. And am I certain he was in this camp, hiding out with relatives as of yesterday?” This time the colonel only nodded.

  “How could you know all that?”

  “Because he was my source.” Al-Asi narrowed his gaze. “What’s wrong, Chief Inspector?”

  “Mossad doesn’t believe Khalil was behind the settlement attack.”

  The colonel considered her words for a moment before responding. “Which would mean I was wrong.”

  “Or your source was.”

  “Same thing, Chief Inspector. And, worse, it could mean I was manipulated, used. I find that most disturbing.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel. I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “I’m not mad at you, Chief Inspector. It’s just that something like this would have been unthinkable two years ago, even one. It makes me realize how far I’ve slipped.”

  Danielle wished she could have said something to comfort the colonel. All of Ben’s experience with him indicated that he was a shrewd, cunning, and immensely reliable operator. A man who had the best sources of any operative in the West Bank and Gaza, coupled with the capacity to employ them. But all that had changed with the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority’s security infrastructure.

  There was no formal entrance to the camp, no stretch of fencing surrounding it. This section was simply a mud-drenched, rank sprawl of tiny shanties, tents, tin huts, and concrete shells squeezed together without reason or discernible organization. Flat patches where the remains had been cleared, and strewn piles of rubble where they hadn’t, provided grim testament to the Israeli bulldozing efforts some months back. Nearly every building Danielle and al-Asi passed showed the divot, pockmark, or hole left behind by a bullet.

  This particular camp was in even greater disrepair than the ones in the West Bank, with which Danielle was more familiar. There was no running water, no facilities for washing or bathing. No ovens, stoves, or electricity. Al-Asi had taken the lead once they entered the camp and, walking beside him, Danielle watched children playing soccer in a cemetery. The children, all boys, trampled over freshly poured graves to chase a ball ricocheting off the remnants of gravestones. Not even half wore shoes. Beyond the cemetery, in a strip of tin and concrete shacks, women had fashioned makeshift ovens out of stone slabs. The smell of bread baking mingled with the stench of raw sewage, spoiled food, and unwashed bodies.

  Colonel al-Asi seemed to know where he was going, and Danielle did not question him.

  “You still have your sources, Colonel,” she offered lamely, feeling the need to say something as they progressed deeper into the camp.

  “Only temporarily, Chief Inspector. I have so many because I have always taken care of them. Now my resources are drying up, and I will not be able to take care of them much longer.”

  “I’m sure my government would be willing to help.”

  “Perhaps make me a line item in your annual budget, eh, Chief Inspector?” al-Asi quipped, but Danielle had already realized the folly of her remark. The colonel could only function if he was autonomous. Instead, now he risked being trapped between two disparate and warring cultures, too dangerous to be accepted by either.

  “It’s a moot point anyway,” he continued, “because eventually the worst of the terrorists, the ones who are known to me, will be gone and we will be left with only the new ones I have no intimate knowledge of. I fear that day for both of us.”

  Al-Asi swung left down a rut-filled dirt road wide enough to accommodate a single vehicle, then turned right down another. He had dressed casually for the journey, in khakis and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. A bandanna already soaked through with sweat circled his neck. Strangely, though, the difference in wardrobe did nothing to diminish his regal demeanor. For al-Asi, Danielle knew, appearance was based on attitude; it was the lack of his legendary security entourage that made the colonel seem naked by comparison with years past.

  The roads weren’t marked by any signs Danielle could see; that would make it too easy to apprehend suspects taking refuge in the camps. But there must have been some kind of order to the place that the colonel understood. His sense of direction never wavered; he never gave a hint that he did not know exactly where he was going.

  The homes grew slightly more presentable as Danielle and al-Asi drew closer to the center of the camp, the residents more settled but the stench much the same. Though larger, these shacks seemed to have more people to squeeze inside them, no square footage left to waste.

  “The unemployment rate is seventy percent in Gaza,” al-Asi explained. “No money coming in and none going out. The worst kind of cycle. With peace, these places would have come down and luxury apartments would have gone up. I’ve seen the plans for this very land, to be built primarily with Israeli venture-capital money. I wonder what’s become of those plans now.”

  The road banked up a modest incline, and Danielle followed the colonel up it toward a shanty with a tin roof and burlap windows. A woman was boiling water in a rusty pot atop an open flame. As they filed past her to a door fabricated of stray boards nailed haphazardly together, the woman peered inside a cracked stone oven to check on the progress of a loaf of bread baking there.

  “My source’s mother,” the colonel said. “Hakim,” he called through a break in the uneven slats. “Hakim?”

  When there was no response, Al-Asi eased open the door and entered. Danielle followed without being told to, not realizing her mistake until the colonel swung round in the darkness after he heard the door rattle shut. She froze, reaching instinctively for her gun when she felt a knife pressed firmly against the flesh of her throat.

  * * * *

  Chapter 16

  T

  he blade trembled against Danielle’s
flesh, the edge dull and jagged, the hand attached to it dry with cracked calluses.

  Before her, Colonel al-Asi hadn’t so much as flinched. “Let her go, Hakim. She’s a friend.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to bring anyone else!” The words emerged in a rasp, the man’s breath dry and rank.

  “She can help you, Hakim, but not if you slit her throat. This woman is an Israeli official who has agreed to arrange safe passage for you and your family to Turkey, as you requested,” al-Asi promised, even though he had never discussed the offer with Danielle.

  Hakim pulled the knife away from Danielle’s throat and released her, sliding sideways. She turned and saw he was short and stout, with a face that looked too narrow for his frame. Danielle figured he must have stretched up on his toes to reach her neck.

  “My brother is in Turkey,” he said.

  “Now sit and tell us the tale that has you so scared. Give my Israeli friend a reason to secure passage for you to Turkey.”

  Al-Asi glanced at Danielle as Hakim retreated to a rear corner of the small shack and sat down with his legs crossed. The colonel gazed down at him, his eyes twinkling mischievously. She began to understand the subtle power and grace Ben had often described. How he got things done in a world that defied professionalism.

  “What happened yesterday at Akram Khalil’s hideout in Gaza?” the colonel prodded.

  Hakim flapped his legs together nervously. “I made myself scarce in the late morning, as you suggested. There’s an escape hatch hidden where the garden used to be that leads into a tunnel. I was halfway down it when I found the tunnel blocked.” He tried to focus on al-Asi, but his eyes kept darting warily to Danielle. She could see he had stuck the knife back into his belt, the blade pitifully small and pitted. Probably used to slice potatoes or fruit. “So I came back and slipped back up through the hatch. I started to walk around the building, figuring I’d have to take my chances with the guards, tell them I was running an errand or something, when I heard the voices.”

  Danielle and al-Asi exchanged a glance. Hakim was getting more agitated, starting to tremble as he spoke.

  “They were all strangers to me. I didn’t recognize a single one, so I stayed hidden behind the building and peered out. Khalil knew them, but he kept his distance, especially from the biggest one.” Hakim waved a hand in front of his right eye. “The big one’s eye was covered in a patch, and he had a long, jagged scar down the same side of his face. And he was tall, very tall. He seemed to be someone important, high up in the movement. I could not see the rest of his face. But he carried a weapon and wore a gun belt. Those I could see.”

  “Khalil let the man keep his weapon?” al-Asi asked.

  “All the men kept their weapons,” Hakim said. “Four men, I counted four. Well, not men exactly...”

  “What do you mean?” Danielle asked him.

  “Keep her silent or I will speak no more,” Hakim told al-Asi fearfully.

  “Commander Barnea is the one who can get your family to safety, Hakim,” the colonel advised. “It is not in your best interests for me to give her orders.”

  Hakim shot Danielle a disparaging glance, then returned to his story. “There was arguing, very heated. Khalil was shouting the loudest. Both sides drew their weapons, but then things seemed to calm down. Two of the strangers stayed with Khalil’s two guards in the courtyard while the other two, including the giant, disappeared into the back with Khalil and the rest of the guards. The first gunshots came very quickly after that.”

  “Silenced?” Danielle posed.

  Hakim nodded rapidly. “In short spurts, two or three shots at a time. Just a single rifle, the tall man’s—I know it.”

  Professionals for sure, then, Danielle concluded, short, controlled bursts being the trademark of seasoned killers with extensive training.

  “As soon as the first shots sounded,” Hakim was saying, “the strangers who had remained in the courtyard drew their weapons and cut down both guards.”

  “What had they been arguing about before?”

  “I couldn’t make out all the words. Something about a plan, an operation. I heard the United States mentioned several times.”

  Danielle exchanged a glance with al-Asi.

  “They were disagreeing over something that had happened,” Hakim continued, “something that had changed.”

  “What time was this?” Danielle asked Hakim.

  “I do not know exactly. Morning prayers had just been completed.”

  “Around ten a.m.,” she figured. Then, to al-Asi, “Barely a half hour before my team arrived. What happened next?” Danielle asked Hakim.

  “There was no next,” he answered and swung quickly back toward al-Asi. “I went back and hid in the tunnel until they were gone. Then I came here to the camp, only to learn there had been men asking about me, men no one had ever seen here before.”

  “How did you get in?”

  Hakim looked toward al-Asi before responding.

  “Tell her,” the colonel instructed.

  “There are secret routes used by our people to escape when the Israelis come.”

  “But these men who killed Khalil and his guards, they weren’t Israeli.”

  Hakim shook his head demonstratively. “No. And one of them . . .”

  “What?” Danielle prodded when he let his statement tail off.

  “No.” Hakim lifted his gaze back up unsteadily. “No. You want to hear the rest, get me and my family away from here. Not until then do we speak again. Agreed?”

  “Yes,” Danielle said.

  Hakim seemed to relax when al-Asi spoke suddenly. “You lied to me about the raid on the settlement in Gaza, didn’t you?”

  “No, Colonel, I would never—”

  “This is me you are talking to, Hakim,” al-Asi said amicably. “You can keep your family safe from Hamas, but...”

  He let his comment drift off, his point made.

  “I wasn’t actually there,” Hakim confessed, “at the settlement.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “One of Khalil’s soldiers boasted about the attack to me.”

  “Was this soldier killed at the compound yesterday?”

  Hakim looked down at the floor. “No.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Three days ago when he gave me the news.”

  “It would seem I was set up,” al-Asi said, almost too softly to hear, after he and Danielle had emerged from Hakim’s shack.

  Danielle nearly collided with a tall man walking the narrow street, his head bent down and his eyes on the ground. “We both were, Colonel, by someone who wanted Khalil’s execution to become a priority.” Danielle thought of something else. “By the way, passage to Turkey for an entire family?”

  “Most generous of you, Chief Inspector. You should know Hakim has four children.”

  “I was supposed to be the one who took Khalil out,” Danielle said, trying to make sense of what she had learned.

  “Obviously something changed.”

  “Including the timetable. Whoever sent this one-eyed man and the other assassins couldn’t risk waiting for me to show up to do the job.” Danielle reviewed Hakim’s tale briefly in her mind. “Khalil knew his killers.”

  “And had been expecting them, by Hakim’s account.”

  “Things didn’t happen yesterday morning as I thought they did at all. Khalil couldn’t have burned those pages in the midst of the shootout. It had to have been the killers who set them on fire.”

  “Because there was a message in the contents they didn’t want getting out to the world.”

  “The end of all things. But let’s assume Khalil and his killers were both involved in the plot. What could have happened to change them from allies to foes?”

  They passed a trio of women carrying baskets heavily laden with clothes, having made a trip to what passed for a laundry in the camp: wooden barrels of boiled water, thick and dark with the soil of numerous loads. The wome
n turned away from Danielle, their bare feet sloshing through the muddy ground.

  “Oh, my God,” she realized, stopping.

  “Chief Inspector?”

  “That man we passed back there in the street outside of Hakim’s, the one who was hunched over, his shoes were new. ...”

  Danielle tore past al-Asi, heard him pounding to catch up as she retraced her path back through the camp. Her sense of direction betrayed her at an intersection and she started to veer left instead of right until the colonel clamped a hand on her shoulder and pulled her onward.