The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  “Why? Because I’m not a terrorist?”

  If the remark stung Lewanthall, he didn’t show it. “No, because the Arabs who are have made it impossible for you to fly on a plane without being searched. Have dinner in a restaurant without being watched. And they’ve bankrupted your people, killed your dreams. Hell, terrorists have done more damage to the people they claim to represent than anyone else.”

  “Wait a minute, you said you had bait?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is we had them. Eight of the twenty most-wanted terrorists in the world, or their immediate representatives. We had them all. Videotapes, audiotapes, e-mail addresses, safe houses.”

  “Surveillance?”

  Lewanthall shook his head and brushed the smoke from his face. “We didn’t have the manpower.”

  “Because your operation wasn’t authorized.”

  “Something would have leaked if it had been, something would have broken down. Don’t you see? This way, only a few people had to know.”

  “And only a few people could help.”

  Ben could see Lewanthall squeeze his eyes closed through the darkness. “It still would have worked, should have worked.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “We lost them.”

  “How, for God’s sake?”

  Lewanthall’s face looked like that of a pale granite statue. “Somebody started killing the terrorists we’d sucked into our trap, each and every one.”

  “Like Akram Khalil,” Ben realized.

  “How do you know about Khalil?” Lewanthall demanded again.

  “Never mind how I know. Yes or no? He was the one in charge of this cell you had trapped, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” the man from the State Department confirmed. “Mohammed Latif was his ranking deputy here.”

  “What about this delivery Latif mentioned before he was killed?”

  “It could only mean one thing.” Lewanthall shifted in his chair and enough light caught his eyes for Ben to see them blinking rapidly. “We had to offer the terrorists something they wanted, something they couldn’t get without us. Bring something to the table so they’d sit with us.

  “What’d you bring, Mr. Lewanthall?”

  The man from the State Department started to raise his cigarette back to his lips, then lowered it again. “Smallpox.”

  “You gave them smallpox?”

  “No, for Christ’s sake, we provided a plan to steal it. That was the bait.”

  “I thought all significant reserves of it were destroyed years ago.”

  “So did the terrorists, Mr. Kamal; that was the point. In fact, reserves, significant reserves of smallpox were maintained in the labs of USAMRIID on the grounds of Fort Detrick in Maryland.”

  “Were. You said were.”

  “Because they’re gone,” Lewanthall said, a quiver in his voice. “Somebody put our plan into action three days ago. The same time the terrorists started dying.”

  “The Last of Days,” Ben muttered.

  “Pardon me.”

  “Khalil had left papers behind, some sort of fatwa, a religious edict that gave him permission to bring on what the Koran calls the Last of Days. In the United States.”

  Lewanthall began fidgeting in his chair, his cigarette forgotten. “Khalil’s plan would have been to have someone else release the smallpox for him, someone in this country, to deflect the blame from his group.”

  “That must have been the delivery Latif was talking about,” Ben concluded. “Assume he masterminded the Fort Detrick theft, acting on Khalil’s instructions. Only something went wrong.”

  The man from the State Department nodded rapidly. “Whoever’s help Khalil enlisted decided to wipe out his network, any link back to the source. . . .”

  “It’s not that simple. Think about it, Lewanthall. Knocking off terrorists in this country is one thing, but getting Khalil at his hideout in the Gaza Strip?”

  “What are you saying?”

  Ben watched the cigarette burning down in Lewanthall’s hand, the ashes lengthening. “Someone else is involved here. You asked me how I knew Akram Khalil was dead. An Israeli commando team found him and his guards all murdered when they arrived at his compound. Someone had beaten them to the task, someone who wanted to finish the job of covering the tracks that started here. Someone very, very good.”

  “We find the smallpox, stop the release, nothing else matters,” the man from the State Department said weakly.

  “We’ll need help,” Ben said pointedly.

  “I’ll have to bring Washington into the loop.”

  “That will mean your career, Mr. Lewanthall.”

  The man from the State Department almost smiled. “I can live with that.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 32

  E

  xhausted, Ben at last fell asleep in his clothes atop the covers. He had made plans to meet Lewanthall that afternoon, long enough, he hoped, to give the man from the State Department time to brief his superiors on what the country was facing. They would rendezvous at Ford Field, where the annual Dearborn Homecoming celebration was going on. The celebration included a fairgroundslike atmosphere complete with carnival rides and crowds Ben could feel safe among, although he wondered if he’d ever feel safe again until all this was over.

  His cell phone rang, the planned call from his brother awaking him at eight a.m. sharp. A car picked him up outside the motel an hour later, driven by a young man in his twenties Ben guessed was one of the Palestinian “students” Sayeed had sponsored in the States.

  The young man had nothing to say, and Ben wasn’t in the mood for conversation anyway. They passed dozens of restaurants on the way and Ben began to feel his stomach contracting, feel himself coming back to life with the first pangs of hunger, but resisted the temptation to stop for food.

  Instead his driver wheeled onto the freeway, then took the exit for the suburb of Livonia, an area dominated by Palestinian Christians who had settled there after the initial influx that included the Kamal family. The homes were newer and slightly higher-end than those in Dearborn, testament to the sprawl of development to meet the needs of the growing Arab population of metropolitan Detroit.

  The young man slowed as they approached a stately colonial revival house that could have been home to any middle-class suburban American family. Ben wondered why his brother had chosen to hide the family here, until he caught flecks of motion inside the windows along with the slight glint of gun barrels their wielders made no effort to conceal.

  The guns were everywhere. The man who opened the door for Ben had one. So did the two watching the front and back windows. His brother greeted him away from the door, out of view from the street.

  “Our mother is upstairs,” Sayeed reported. “My wife and children too. I haven’t told them very much.”

  Ben glanced up the stairs, the shadow of another gunman looming there. “Have you told them this is your fault?”

  “No more than the nature of your involvement. But we’re safe here,” Sayeed assured him.

  “Don’t count on that. Things are worse than I thought.”

  “You spoke with the man from the State Department?”

  “We talked.”

  “He couldn’t help?”

  “He will. I’ll know more this afternoon.”

  Sayeed glanced up the stairs. “Our mother’s been waiting to see you.”

  His mother was upstairs, sitting near the door in one of the bedrooms the Kamal family had appropriated. Ben had not asked about this house, or the men guarding it, and his brother hadn’t volunteered any information, because the only thing that mattered was that the closest family Ben had left in the world was safe.

  His mother seemed to look older every time he saw her, after changing hardly at all over the course of the first thirty years of his life. Ben had thought returning to the States and visiting her more often would make the passage of time seem kinder. But it hadn’t. She had been a
young woman and then overnight she was old, the grasp on youth impossible to recover once it had slipped away. Her spine was bent slightly and inches seemed to melt from her frame with each of his visits. Her eyes and mind, though, remained as sharp as ever.

  ‘“I had more than my share of times like these with your father,” she told him. “Jafir Kamal was a great man.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “No, but it helps me to say it. It’s all I have left of him to convince me he didn’t leave us and die back in Palestine for nothing.”

  “He died because he couldn’t compromise his beliefs. That made him a threat.”

  Ben’s mother stared at him pointedly. “You should learn from him, Bayan.” A car raced down the street outside, tires squealing, and she tensed until the sound passed. “You and your brother never got along, you know,” his mother continued. “Since you were babies, always fighting like cats and dogs. So different, no matter what your father and I did. We thought coming to America would make a difference. It didn’t. Neither did your father’s death. Or,” she added, after swallowing a hefty breath, “the passing of your family and then Sayeed’s son. Now you get along. The look on your faces, the way you talk to each other. It warms my heart.”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  “Because look what it took. And because you can’t stop behaving like your father. Your brother has always accepted the fact that he is ordinary. That’s why I believe the two of you never got along; because he couldn’t accept that you were not. Then your father’s death made him feel even more inferior to you, even though he was older. I think he has accepted that now.” She sighed heavily. “Just as I accepted what I must.”

  “You speak in riddles.”

  His mother’s strong yet weary eyes sought him out. “Like your father, you must always have your battles to fight. One after the other, no matter where you go, what path your life takes.” She stopped and then started again just as quickly, her eyes darting with her mind. “The Israeli woman could not live with you, even here, in America?”

  “Something happened.”

  “And if it hadn’t?” his mother asked, not bothering to probe that subject further.

  “She couldn’t turn down the chance to run National Police. I told her she should go. To be happy.”

  “Implying she couldn’t be with you, because, my son, she knows what I know. She figured it out a long time ago, even though she may not realize it. I understand, believe me. Listen to me and think on my words.”

  “I have, and it’s not just who I am; it’s who we both are. She lives for her battles too. It’s not that we wait for them, just that we know they’re coming.”

  “Warriors, both of you. Just like your father was.”

  “He couldn’t help it, could he?”

  “No more than you can. He was cursed by the ability to always see the bigger picture.”

  “The measure of a great man,” he said.

  “And often a lonely one. Even with his family Jafir Kamal was lonely.” Her gaze turned quizzical. “Why is that, Bayan?”

  “Because we were a part of his life, never all of it.”

  “When he left, though, he knew he had something to come back to. And that is what pains me about you, my son. You have left yourself nothing to come back to.”

  Ben took her wrinkled hands in his and held them tight. “But this time I’m not going anywhere.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 33

  I

  t’s that one right up there, Commander,” Sergeant Ehud Cohen said to Danielle, directing her toward a tall, narrow building sloping up a rise in the Old City. “I’ll wait outside if you want.”

  “You’ve spoken to the man inside?”

  “Only to show him a picture of Zanah Fahury and ask if he recognized her.”

  Danielle gazed across the street, then back at the young detective. David Vordi’s veiled threats aside, she had no intention of abandoning this investigation now. “I see you’ve had a change of heart, Sergeant.”

  “The fingerprints on the bus ticket to Jerusalem matched the dead woman’s. And I was able to find a second bus driver who remembers picking her up at the central depot on Jaffa Street and taking her here to the Old City.”

  “Interesting he would remember a simple old woman.”

  “He said she had been taking his bus regularly for years.”

  “Every few months.”

  “Something like that. The driver remembered dropping her off always on this block. I interviewed the local merchants and found one who recognized our victim.” Cohen’s eyes drifted toward a third-floor jewelry shop. “Up there.”

  “A lot of legwork to expend on the murder of an Arab, Sergeant.”

  Cohen hesitated, then lowered his voice. “I didn’t realize who you were. I’ve read about all your accomplishments and the famous cases you’ve solved.” He stopped, but quickly started again, his mind shifting gears. “And my grandfather knew your father.”

  “Your grandfather,” Danielle repeated, realizing that the young man before her came from an entirely different generation.

  Cohen nodded. “They served together before your father became head of strategic planning.”

  “That won’t matter if your superiors find out you’re cooperating with me.”

  “I don’t really care what my superiors think anyway,” the young detective continued obstinately.

  “Then in that case, Sergeant,” Danielle said to him before crossing the street, “you should join me when I question this shopkeeper whom you found.”

  They dodged the frantic, maddening traffic together and climbed an outdoor set of stairs to a shop occupying the topmost floor of the building, perched at an odd, upward angle. The jewelry store had no sign advertising its presence here, only thickly barred display windows filled with the shop’s wares. Elegant pieces that lacked none of the glisten or glitter found in Stern’s and more prestigious jeweler’s elsewhere in Jerusalem at considerably higher prices.

  “Mr. Glickstein,” Cohen said to a broad, bearded Hasidim squeezed behind the counter, a jeweler’s glass pressed against his eye and a diamond in his hand, “this is Commander Barnea of National Police.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Glickstein greeted her, not looking up from his inspection of the diamond. “Just give me a minute.”

  It was at least that long before he eased the diamond into a padded case and lowered the jeweler’s glass from his eye.

  “We’re here about Zanah Fahury,” Cohen told him.

  “A name that means nothing to me.”

  “The old woman who was murdered.”

  “I never knew her name. I told you that.”

  “We’re wondering if robbery might have been a motive in her murder,” Danielle said, speaking for the first time. “Something she purchased in your shop, perhaps.”

  “She didn’t purchase anything here. She never purchased anything here.”

  “You saw her frequently?”

  “Regularly. Sometimes every two months, sometimes every three, at most four. She seldom looked at me straight. Never smiled. Always hid her face with a head scarf.” Here the man behind the counter made a motion with his hand before his cheeks. “I always recognized her from her eyes. Sad eyes. Lonely eyes.”

  “But she didn’t buy anything from you,” said Danielle, still trying to discern the murdered woman’s purpose in coming here.

  “Never.”

  “Then what—”

  “She sold. She comes to me because I give a fair price. No haggling. No bickering.”

  Danielle exchanged a glance with Ehud Cohen before returning her gaze to the store’s proprietor. “What was it she sold to you?”

  The man plucked from the case the stone he’d been examining when they entered the shop. “Diamonds,” he said, holding it outward. “Just like this one.”

  Danielle looked at the small stone glistening in the shop’s bright lighting. “Every
few months, you say . . .”

  Glickstein rocked his head from side to side, weighing the question. “Give or take. I could look it up.”

  “And the diamonds, they were always this size?”

  “More or less. Decent stones, but nothing special.”