The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  “Israeli Arab. Or has your investigation not proceeded that far yet?”

  Cohen remained silent. He had probably considered many explanations for why the acting head of National Police would want to see him, and this was certainly not one of them.

  “Tell me, Sergeant Cohen, how did Zanah Fahury die?”

  “It was a robbery, Ms. Barnea.”

  “That’s Commander Barnea, Sergeant, and that wasn’t what I asked you. How was the women killed? Shot? Stabbed? Beaten? Blunt force trauma to the head, perhaps?”

  “She was beaten to death. I believe her head was caved in.”

  “You believe?”

  “My investigation is still in the preliminary stages.”

  “After three days?”

  “I’ve been backed up.”

  Danielle rose and came around the front of her desk so she could glare down at Cohen. “You’re sure it was a simple robbery, Sergeant?”

  Cohen squirmed in his chair. “All indications point to that, yes.”

  “And how was the victim dressed when she was found?”

  “In shabby clothes.”

  “So a poor Arab woman wearing shabby clothes was the target of a robbery. Have I got that right?”

  Cohen fidgeted nervously again. “Why am I here, Commander?”

  “Because a murder was committed in your jurisdiction that has not been properly followed up. The reason for this must be either incompetence on your part or the fact that the victim was an Arab. I’m curious as to which, Sergeant.”

  “Neither, Commander,” Cohen said, less defensively than Danielle expected. “Since the woman was a resident of Umm al Fahm—”

  “I’ll ask you again, what evidence do you have that this was a robbery?”

  “The pockets in the victim’s coat were turned inside out.”

  “Empty?”

  “Except for her identification card, yes.”

  “What about in the vicinity of the body?”

  “Just a bus ticket for Jerusalem. But we have no way of knowing whether or not it was hers.”

  “Did you check to see if it matched her fingerprints?”

  “No.”

  “Then you do have a way, don’t you? What about speaking with the victim’s neighbors in Umm al Fahm, others who knew her?”

  “We interviewed witnesses on the scene.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “The couple who found her body.”

  “In an alley.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long had it been there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You called the medical examiner, yes?”

  “We transported the body.”

  “And the crime scene?”

  Silence.

  “The crime scene, Sergeant Cohen, you secured it, of course.”

  “No, Commander, we didn’t.”

  “Because the victim was Arab or was from outside Jerusalem? Both, I would imagine.”

  Cohen had no response.

  “And her home, did you check out her home?”

  Cohen remained silent.

  “I would have thought in the matter of robbery, a check of the victim’s personal possessions would be called for. So you’ve never seen her home, have you, Sergeant? You never bothered to go to Umm al Fahm.”

  “No, Commander,” Cohen said in a muffled voice.

  “But you have her address. Please tell me you at least know that much from the ID you found on her person.”

  Cohen nodded.

  “Then let’s take a ride to Umm al Fahm and see what we find, eh, Sergeant?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 23

  B

  en settled back into the front seat of the car holding a pair of coffees he’d purchased at a convenience store down the street. “Did you find what you were looking for?” his brother asked, accepting the cup Ben held out to him.

  “There’s a fire escape in the back of the building,” Ben reported, “but no exterior door leading to the upstairs apartment. That means the only way in is a set of stairs inside the building off the kitchen.”

  “Which explains why Latif tracked flour into the other apartment he moved out of.”

  “Exactly. If I’m right, he must have a key to the building. Comes and goes as he pleases through the kitchen.”

  Sayeed gazed across the street at the bakery again. “I have never gone into this place, know nothing of the owner.”

  “I’m betting he’s part of Hamas’s network here in the States. An underling who provides a safe house when requested. You can bet Latif isn’t the first to have stayed here.”

  “So, if you’re right, we’ll see Latif when he returns.”

  “You’ll see him. I won’t because I have no idea what he looks like, which explains why you are still here, my brother.”

  Sayeed shifted uneasily. His gaze drifted across the street, to the second-floor windows of the building. “The blinds are still drawn. He must not be home.”

  “Hamas teaches their agents to keep the blinds closed at all times, so their possessions can not be seen or photographed from afar.”

  “That’s how you knew he was hiding out in this bakery.”

  “It’s how I narrowed down the list, yes. I won’t know for sure if Latif is staying here until he comes back.” Ben settled back in the driver’s seat and sipped his coffee. “Which could take a while.”

  Two hours past nightfall, Mohammed Latif had still not shown up. The bakery had closed an hour earlier, only a single light left burning. In the night, even through the drawn blinds, Ben could tell no lights were on inside the second-floor apartment. He was beginning to doubt the validity of his own conclusions. Perhaps he had rushed to judgment, wanting too badly to spare his brother and family the agony of a State Department investigation. In the past eighteen months, Arab men had been detained indefinitely for far less than Sayeed was already guilty of. If he failed to deliver Latif to Lewanthall, Ben feared that that was the fate awaiting his brother.

  He had already lost Danielle to Hollis Buchert and his thugs at Pine Valley. She had saved his life and been forced to flee as a result. In trying to keep her with him, he had effectively lost her forever.

  Lights shone in the rearview mirror, snapping Ben alert again. He reached up and adjusted the mirror slightly to eyeball a car that had slowed behind him, a block back. The car idled for a long moment before pulling up into a no-parking zone. A match sparked inside the car, the lighting of a cigarette enough for Ben to clearly discern at least three shapes: two in the front and one, he thought, in the back.

  Sayeed stirred restlessly, started to stretch his arms, when Ben lashed a hand across the seat to restrain him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Stay low in the seat and don’t move. A car with three men inside just parked on the block behind us.”

  Sayeed turned slowly to look out the rear window but saw nothing through the darkness. He turned back to Ben and saw him pressing a number into his cell phone.

  “You’re calling for help,” Sayeed said hopefully.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Yes,” a voice greeted.

  “It’s Ben Kamal, Lewanthall.”

  “You have news concerning Latif? Already?”

  “Go fuck yourself. I know what’s going on.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’ve been following me all along. I find Latif and you send your thugs to pick him up. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ben hesitated. “If you’re lying to me . . .”

  “I’m not.”

  Ben checked the rearview mirror again, the three shapes barely discernible in the light cast by a flickering street lamp.

  “Are they in a car, Mr. Kamal? Can you get me a license plate?”

  “I’m too far away.”

  “What about help, backup?”

  A man approached t
he bakery on a bicycle and slid to a halt at the front door. Sayeed reached over and grabbed Ben’s forearm.

  “It’s too late,” Ben told Lewanthall. “Latif’s here.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 24

  B

  en started the engine and pulled away from the curb.

  “Why are we leaving?” Sayeed asked him.

  “We’re not.”

  “Kamal!” Lewanthall’s voice blared over the cell phone. “Kamal, can you hear me?”

  Ben hit end and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Then he swung the car into the street, driving carefully so as not to attract the attention of the men in the car parked behind him. He caught a glimpse of Mohammed Latif dragging his bike through the bakery door, thought he might have seen the flicker of a dome light in the dark sedan, one of its doors opening.

  Sayeed twisted to look behind him. “Who the fuck are they?”

  Ben pulled down a narrow side street and then squeezed his rental into a back alley that separated the bakery building from a cluster of tenements at its rear. His mind strayed to Danielle’s tale of Akram Khalil, the terrorist for whom Latif was working, being gunned down by a similarly mysterious group.

  “Stay here!” he ordered his brother, starting to climb out through the driver’s door he had thrust open.

  “The hell I will!”

  “For your own good.”

  Sayeed tried to squeeze out the passenger side, but Ben had jammed the rental in too tightly to leave enough space, so he began to shimmy across the seat. “It’s for your own good I’m coming: Latif doesn’t know you. How do you suppose he’ll react?”

  Ben started to close the door behind him, then stopped, conceding his brother’s point. “All right. Follow my lead and stay behind me.”

  Sayeed laid a single foot on the pavement and saw the drawn pistol in Ben’s hand. Ben moved off toward the fire escape before he could react. He leaped to grab the bottom-most rung and used his arms to hoist himself upward. Almost to the second-story window, he gazed back to find Sayeed struggling to follow.

  The window was locked, the blinds drawn. Ben jimmied the window, found it unlocked, and opened it enough to lower his right leg through. He contorted his frame to ease his left after it, had just felt it scrape wood when something slammed into his spine.

  The brunt of the blow fell on his right hip, deadening that leg for the moment while likely saving his vertebrae from cracking. Ben tumbled to the floor, struck it hard with nothing to break his fall. Flashes exploded before his eyes, his breath sucked out of him. He thought he might have momentarily passed out; came to, first to the realization that he still held the pistol in his hand and, second, to Sayeed’s pleading voice.

  “It’s me, Mohammed, it’s me!”

  Sayeed Kamal must have climbed in through the window after him, and now Ben watched his brother approach Mohammed Latif with hands held open before him. Latif grabbed hold of his shoulder and spun Sayeed around, holding Ben’s brother around the neck with one hand, while the other pressed a pistol to his skull.

  “Stay where you are! Don’t move!” Latif screamed in Arabic when he saw Ben begin to stir on the floor. “The gun! Drop it!”

  Ben did as he was told.

  “Push it away from you.”

  Ben shoved the pistol across the pockmarked wood.

  “Now, sit up. Slowly.’

  Ben arched his back and felt pain explode down his spine, grimacing. A baseball bat rolled back and forth on the floor between him and Latif, obviously the weapon that had done the damage.

  “Who is he, Sayeed?” Latif demanded.

  “My, my brother.”

  “Your brother?” The terrorist’s piercing dark eyes found Ben again, then rotated back to Sayeed. “What did you tell him about me? What did you tell him about me?” Latif dragged Sayeed across the floor without waiting for an answer, jerking his neck back further. “Are there others? Are there more?”

  “Three,” Ben said, before Sayeed had a chance to answer. “Outside, but they’re not with us.”

  Latif yanked Sayeed to the front window and pulled the drawn shade back just far enough to peer into the street. “I can’t see them. . . .”

  “Let us help you,” Sayeed pleaded.

  Latif smacked him in the temple with the gun barrel. Sayeed’s knees buckled and he nearly collapsed. “Liar! You brought them here! You must have!”

  “No,” Sayeed said, still grimacing in pain. “You can still make this right. Let us help you.”

  “Help me? You can’t. No one can. The others are all dead. We were deceived. Khalil realized this, but by the time he reached me, it was too late. I had already made the delivery.”

  “What delivery?” Sayeed asked, holding Ben back with his eyes. “Tell us what you’re talking about. Let us help you!”

  Latif’s grip on Sayeed slackened. “It’s too late. After the ones outside, others will come. Khalil warned me, and now he is dead too.”

  “He feared for his own life?”

  “The last time I spoke with him he did. He said something about making an enemy he wasn’t expecting.”

  Ben nodded, trying to recall exactly what Danielle had said about Akram Khalil’s executioners. “Why?”

  “A disagreement with a superior, maybe.”

  “Khalil answered to a superior?”

  “Well, not a superior exactly. It’s been so long, let me just collect my thoughts. He was obsessed by our latest project, getting what we needed to do more harm to America than anyone had ever done.”

  “You’re saying that’s what you delivered?” Ben demanded.

  “We couldn’t be blamed, you see,” Latif said. “Khalil had figured it all out. Someone else to do the work of God for us. But now this. It makes no sense!”

  “Let me go, Mohammed,” Sayeed Kamal said quite calmly. “We can still get you out of this. I promise.”

  Latif sighed and had just released his grasp on Sayeed when the door to the apartment burst open, splintered wood flying in all directions. Latif spun around, retraining his pistol, just as a stitch of automatic fire tore into his midsection. Ben thought he could see the orange trails of bullets, actually see them draw flecks of smoke from Latif’s clothes.

  The force of the bullets slammed Latif backward into Sayeed, knocking Sayeed over and sparing him from the next barrage, which tore into Latif’s neck and face before shattering the windows over the bakery’s facade.

  A pair of dark figures spun into the room.

  Ben dragged himself to the side, managed to recover his pistol as his numb leg betrayed him and gave out. He fired from the floor, before the killers had recorded his presence. Fired and kept firing.

  He didn’t aim consciously, just shot at the shapes twisting in the apartment’s darkness. The echoes stung his ears, left them ringing. But Ben had enough hearing left to make out the thwacks of his bullets striking home and the sizzling of bullets fired by the killers in desperation before they fell.

  “Sayeed!” he called, pushing himself painfully to his knees, his ears ringing from the percussion of the gunshots.

  “Here,” the weak, terrified voice of his brother replied.

  “Are you all right? Are you hit?”

  “No. I mean, I’m . . . fine. I’m okay.”

  His brother pushed Latif’s corpse from him and staggered to his feet. He stumbled across the floor and looped an arm around Ben’s shoulders to help him rise.

  The pain brought tears to Ben’s eyes, but he could feel and put pressure on his leg again, the numbness subsiding.

  Ben leaned back against the wall adjacent to the window he had shattered. He looked at the two men he had killed, feeling nothing, thinking instead of the third man they must have left in the car.

  “Let’s go,” Ben said, snapping a fresh clip into his Sig.

  “You can’t even stand straight up,” Sayeed argued. “Let me—”

  “Stay back from the window,” Ben ordered. “I
’m going out first.”

  Ben eased himself forward, careful not to put too much pressure on his damaged leg. He held the gun as steady as he could, angled toward the half-open window through which he had entered the apartment just minutes before.