The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  “They told me as much. And did you?”

  Danielle looked at al-Asi briefly before speaking. “I don’t know. I doubt I ever will. They were about to raid the People’s Brigade compound anyway. It was just bad luck.”

  “And their agent who had infiltrated the group was shot and killed in the battle.”

  “The response team that flooded the compound videotaped the entire raid, including me running into the woods with Ben. His face was obscured. Mine wasn’t. I left the country before they had the chance to identify me.”

  “No links back to Inspector Kamal or Security Concepts,” al-Asi surmised.

  “That was the idea.”

  “You came back to spare both him and the company the scrutiny.”

  “The job offer made it easier.”

  “How long was it on the table, Chief Inspector?”

  “Longer than I led Ben to believe,” Danielle said evasively, before changing the subject. “Hollis Buchert was never found. He’s still out there.”

  “But that’s not why you want to return to America.”

  “Ben’s a prisoner again, Colonel, of the U.S. State Department this time.”

  Al-Asi’s eyes flashed with concern. “A more difficult rescue operation, I should think.”

  “One requiring different tactics, that’s for sure.”

  “What do you need from me, Chief Inspector?” al-Asi asked her.

  “Just what I told you on the phone: help in getting out of Israel. They’re waiting for me back at National Police. When I don’t return, they’ll be looking for me everywhere.”

  Al-Asi reached into his pocket, removed a thick, padded envelope, and placed it on the bench between them. “I had these papers made for my wife in the event I needed to get my family out of the region fast. A passport, birth certificate, even a driver’s license—all American.” He paused, looking suddenly sad to Danielle. “There’s a diplomatic travel voucher inside as well to help book and pay for your flight.”

  Danielle lifted the envelope onto her lap. “Are you sure you won’t need this for your family someday, Colonel?”

  “Inspector Kamal is my family too, Chief Inspector. I’m going to contact a counterpart of mine in the CIA to see if he can be of some service.”

  “One of your famous favors?” Danielle posed, trying to smile.

  Al-Asi’s gaze had turned reflective. “His son, also in the agency, was captured in Afghanistan. I used my. . . influence to secure the young man’s release. Helping you will relieve him of his debt to me.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Colonel.”

  “There’s someone else you should look up while you’re in Washington, Chief Inspector: the chargé d’affaires at the Israeli embassy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was the number-two man thirty-six years ago on Operation Blue Widow,” al-Asi explained somberly.

  Danielle thought of Zanah Fahury, the crinkled snapshot of two young girls found hidden inside her dresser.

  “That makes him the one man alive who knows the rest of the story,” the colonel finished.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Chapter 49

  M

  y name’s Van Dam, Mr. Kamal,” the man said, closing the door behind him.

  They’d finally moved him to a different room some indeterminate number of hours before. The kind normally found in a cheap motel, except there was no television and the bed was smaller. His guards had opened the door with a key card, and when Ben tried the handle after they were gone it didn’t budge. He tried to sleep and must have managed it for a time, because he was startled awake by the door clicking open. A man he recognized from yesterday carried in a cafeteria tray packed with a hearty breakfast: eggs, toast, doughnuts, juice, coffee, and a Danish. Treating him differently all of a sudden. Something obviously had changed even before Van Dam showed on the scene.

  Ben sat up straight on his bed and stared at the man’s somber eyes, set far back in his head, and his dark hair. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “About your name being Van Dam. Because you look like James Mason in the Hitchcock film North by Northwest. That’s the name of the character he played.”

  The new man from the State Department didn’t look as though he was kidding at all. “There’ve been some new developments we need to discuss with you.”

  Ben wondered if this was part of the routine. Send someone different in to see him outside of the interrogation room that for nearly a day had been his home. Somebody older, with a more authoritative air. The ID badge clipped to Van Dam’s lapel was a different color from that of the other interrogator’s, signifying additional access and authority. A man usually bothered only by things that mattered.

  “It concerns your family, I’m afraid,” Van Dam continued.

  Ben had been expecting that, more standard procedure, these State Department men handling him through a textbook.

  “Mr. Kamal, you should really listen to me. A local police patrol in the Detroit suburb of Livonia responded to suspicious activity at a house. They found five bodies inside.”

  Something cold clamped onto Ben’s insides.

  “Two of the dead men were carrying false identification,” Van Dam continued. “Two others, sponsored by your brother, were in the country on student visas but had dropped out of sight. The final body was that of a woman the authorities were able to identify.” The man’s eyes sought him out somberly. “Your mother, Mr. Kamal.”

  Ben’s senses numbed, the nightmare unfolding around him. Van Dam was still speaking; at least his lips were moving, but Ben couldn’t hear his words. It felt as if water were clogging his ears. The only thing he could hear was his own heart beating. Then it seemed to stop. He realized he wasn’t breathing, tried to suck some air in but seemed to forget how.

  “What about my brother, his wife,” Ben forced out. “His two children.”

  Van Dam shook his head.

  “They’re both in high school,” Ben continued. “A son and a daughter. I don’t know what year.” As if that were important.

  “There’s no sign of them, Mr. Kamal. We know there was a gunfight that took the lives of all four men—”

  “My mother too?” Ben broke in.

  The man nodded reluctantly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kamal.”

  “I’m the one who should be sorry. It was my fault. I got them all into this.”

  Van Dam stepped a little closer. “All indications are that some people did get out of the house. But we don’t know who exactly, or where they went from there. Your brother and his family could still be safe.”

  “The police haven’t heard from them?”

  Van Dam shook his head. “They’re looking.”

  “Do they know how many gunmen?”

  “They don’t know anything for sure. Everything’s changed, though. That’s why I’m here.” Van Dam’s expression looked honestly pained. “Everything you’ve told us checks out to a degree,” he continued, the volume of Ben’s hearing rising with each word. “We’ve retraced as many of Alan Lewanthall’s movements as we could, including his recent trip to Boston to see you. You understand nothing he did was authorized, totally below board and off the books—”

  “He cost my mother her life.”

  “That includes his retaining your services and those of your company. There was no log or record anywhere to support your claims.”

  “What about the men who killed my mother?” Ben demanded.

  “As I said, we don’t know who they were. But we have managed to identify the bodies of those four men whose bodies we found at that bakery in Dearborn. Traced them to a radical group formerly based in Idaho. The People’s Brigade, Mr. Kamal. Have you ever heard of it?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 50

  H

  ow confident are we of this information, Director?” the president asked Director of Homeland Security Stephanie Bayliss.

&nb
sp; “Absolutely positive, sir,” she reported, not bothering to hide the grimness from her voice.

  “Professor Paulsen, are you listening?”

  Paulsen sat with legs apart on the Oval Office carpet just outside the presidential seal, his terry-cloth bathrobe splayed out to either side. He was fiddling with an ancient set of jacks he had found in the bottom drawer of the White House guest room where he had spent the previous night. The game seemed to fascinate and confound him at the same time, left him staring angrily at the pieces when the tiny ball refused to bounce on the carpet as he intended.

  “Did you get my doughnuts?”

  “Professor?”

  “They told me I could have anything I wanted for breakfast. I said I wanted doughnuts. They told me they didn’t have any, that they’d get some. Not the kind you buy in a grocery store, the fancy kind. You know.”

  “Let me find out for you,” the president said, and hit the button on his phone for the kitchen.

  “And, yes, I was listening,” he added, failing miserably to master the jacks once again. “Something about a man named Kamal in State Department custody who’s telling quite a tale.”

  “Part of it checks out,” said Bayliss. “The State Department has confirmed the death of their operative. But at the same time they’ve been unable to confirm all of this man’s story.”

  “This dead operative is good enough for me,” said Paulsen. He stood up quickly, scattering jacks all over the rug. “I’m going out for a while, have a talk with this Ben Kamal myself.”

  “And ask him what, Professor?” Bayliss replied.

  Paulsen straightened his bathrobe. “Well, General, maybe I’ll ask him about Girl Scout cookies. Be a hell of a lot easier to poison the country with those than smallpox. That’s what’s bothering me here, what I haven’t figured out yet.”

  Both Bayliss and the president looked at him quizzically.

  “Why the perpetrators stole smallpox when they had their choice of a dozen other germs and viruses that could do infinitely more damage.”

  “You think Kamal can tell you that?”

  “Right now, he might be the only person who can. Tell the kitchen I’ll have my doughnuts for lunch instead.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 51

  D

  anielle had waited only a few minutes when Hyram Berger, chargé d’affaires of the Israeli embassy in Washington, appeared at the large doorway to the reception room.

  “I must say, this is quite a surprise,” he greeted, taking her hand warmly in both of hers. “To finally meet the daughter of Yakov Barnea after all these years... To what do I owe this pleasure? What brings you to Washington?”

  “I’d like to hear about Operation Blue Widow,” Danielle said, without missing a beat.

  The warmth disappeared from Berger’s expression. Her hand slipped out of his suddenly slack grasp. “I’m afraid I—”

  “The plan was to infiltrate the Saudi hierarchy thirty-six years ago after the Six-Day War by placing Israeli war widows in the most powerful families.”

  Berger’s face relaxed, looked almost sad. “The operation saved Israel.”

  “Then why don’t you sound proud?”

  “I must say,

  “Because I’m not.” Berger sighed. “And neither was your father.”

  “I’m ready,” Hanna Frank told Yakov Barnea, the phone pressed tightly against her ear.

  “Can you get out of the hotel?”

  “Yes, I think so. “ She turned away to avoid her older daughter Layla’s penetrating stare. Across the way, the governess Habiba continued holding Kavi. “But we must hurry.”

  “My men are already in position.”

  She didn’t regret what she had done for a moment. Her husband had served under Barnea, been killed taking Jerusalem in the Six-Day War. They had met for the first time when Barnea had expressed his sympathies at the funeral, having never failed to attend those of the men who fell in his command.

  She was surprised but grateful when the general had stayed in touch. Even more grateful when he made her an offer that could fill the vast void in her life. He had come to her apartment, where they discussed his proposal over tea. Hanna had accepted without hesitation or thought. The opportunity to serve Israel, to seek a measure of revenge against those responsible for her husband’s death, had been too much to pass up.

  The training had begun immediately afterward at a secret base dug out of the Negev Desert: indoctrination, language training, a bit of cosmetic work to make her appear a few years younger, young enough to pass as an American college student. A new identity that would stand up to the utmost scrutiny, constructed for her with the help of the American CIA. Hanna Frank had ceased to exist, for all intents and purposes. She became Anna Pagent, junior transfer student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, whose mission was to meet and seduce the son of a powerful Saudi businessman with familial ties to the royal family named Abdullah Aziz Rahani.

  Hanna Frank had come to Brown as Anna Pagent in the fall of 1967, equipped with an intimate knowledge of Rahani s habits and schedule. Where he ate, when he practiced the two sports that were his passion, sailing and fencing. They had taught her fencing in the Negev, and the first time she met Rahani was on the floor, where they exchanged a few parries. The Saudi had been impressed with her skill, not realizing she could have speared him with a lunge at any time and that it took all her willpower not to do so. She had looked at him and thought of her husband shot dead, thanks to men like this, bleeding to death in someone else’s arms. She had always wondered what his final moments were like. Was he scared, resigned? Were his last thoughts of her and the family they would never share?

  Their courtship had lasted until midway through the semester, when he graduated early and asked her to return with him to Saudi Arabia and become his wife. Rahani had been honest about the drastic changes this would mean in her life. but Anna Pagent, pretending to be in love, never wavered.

  General Yakov Barnea had made three separate trips to see her at Brown through the duration of her courtship, and he was the man Hanna truly loved. It didn’t matter that he was twenty years her senior and an Israeli legend to boot. Yakov Barnea was the only man who could measure up to her husband, and Hanna Frank, now Anna Pagent, had let him become a surrogate in her mind.

  The last time he had debriefed her in Providence had been only a week before her scheduled departure for Saudi Arabia, in the winter of 1968. As always they had met at the counter of a restaurant called the Beef and Bun. Barnea accepted her reports in a manila envelope he’d casually slip into a worn leather satchel. But on this night he’d reached out and took her hand. Hanna was not then sure whether the gesture was meant to be simply reassuring or something else, something more. It had been snowing outside, and the waitress behind the counter was whining about going home early.

  A week later Hanna was on her way to Saudi Arabia. Over the next five years, she had met with Barnea occasionally in London on her shopping trips. But the bulk of communication between them had been conducted through intermediaries, Israeli operatives planted in Riyadh in prearranged places, at predetermined times coinciding with her trips to the city. During her pregnancies, both of them difficult, months would go by without a single contact. Other times she would simply have nothing to report. Then, one fall day in 1973, had come the jackpot that justified the entire operation.

  “You’re talking about the Yom Kippur War of seventy-three,” Danielle realized, when Berger paused in the midst of his tale. “We had advance warning, didn’t we?”

  He didn’t bother answering her question, just resumed in a dull monotone. “Abdullah Aziz Rahani was meeting in his private office with a member of the Saudi intelligence service. Anna listened to their conversation on the transmitter she had planted, provided to her that snowy night in Providence, Rhode Island, by General Yakov Barnea, wrapped in a tampon. It had worked gloriously all those years, never uncovered but also, until that day, nev
er yielding anything pertinent. Apparently, the Saudi intelligence officer had come with instructions on where the bulk of the funds required to finance the Yom Kippur War were to be channeled. The Bank of Rahani was to be the conduit.”

  Berger stopped again, staring blankly ahead. When he resumed, his voice was softer, slightly broken.

  “Four days later Hanna Frank passed a note to one of our agents in Riyadh’s central bazaar. That information was passed to General Barnea in Israel, just two days before the most reverent of Jewish holy days. Enough time, fortunately, to prepare a response while pretending not to be prepared at all. A preemptive strike was out of the question without more proof, as was mobilizing forces or informing the Americans. No, the Israeli government decided this would constitute the perfect rationale to utterly decimate the forces of their Arab enemies. Prevent a similar attack for years, even decades to come.”