The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  Suddenly the door opened with a long creak, freezing both him and Danielle. Then Sayeed Kamal emerged, his face drawn and pale, his expression utterly blank.

  Ben met his brother halfway down the steps and hugged him for the first time since they’d been boys. He felt himself crying, letting the tears come now, Sayeed stiff in his arms but not pushing him away. He could feel his brother’s eyes drift to Danielle and remembered they had met only once before in the wake of the murder of Sayeed’s oldest son, Dawud. The reception then, understandably, had not been warm.

  “Our mother, Bayan ...” Sayeed started when they finally eased apart.

  “I know, my brother.”

  “We barely got out alive. I wanted to go back inside the house for her but I had, well...”

  “You did the right thing. Your wife, my niece and nephew?” Ben managed, fearing the worst.

  “Safe inside.”

  Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The men who killed our mother will be here soon.” He looked toward Danielle, then back at his brother. “After dark.”

  “Then we must leave. I’ll tell my—”

  “It’s too late for that, my brother.”

  “What choice do we have? Even with weapons—”

  “You have guns?”

  Sayeed shook his head. “Not a single one.”

  “Then we make our stand without them.”

  “How, in God’s name?”

  “First tell me where your car is.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can hide mine too.” He looked toward Danielle again and this time he didn’t turn back. “After we unload it.”

  “Unload what?”

  Ben continued to hold Danielle’s resolute stare. “What we need to make our stand.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 66

  S

  ayeed’s wife and teenage children emerged from the house, moving tentatively onto the porch as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  Danielle waved a greeting but never said a word, just opened the back door and hoisted out the first two brown paper bags. She glided past Ben and Sayeed on the steps and carried the bags through the open front door. Ben followed suit, as did Sayeed, his wife, and finally his children. It took two trips before all the bags were unloaded and laid inside the cabin, which smelled of age and disuse. Something spoiled and rotten permeated the air, as if it were dying, having surrendered to loneliness and neglect.

  The cabin had smelled so differently years before, fresh and clean. Its current condition trumped the memory, invalidating it. Ben walked about past the dingy furnishings, all warped and discolored by age. The heavy wood tables and chairs had survived intact, while the upholstered furniture had not held up well at all. Cracks and tears showed in the upholstery. Bleached-out swatches gave testament to the unrelenting harshness of the sun blazing through the windows. Sleeping bags lay strewn across the floor. The remnants of a fire smoldered in the fireplace. Ben saw kerosene lanterns scattered about to provide light once night fell.

  Ben turned and found Danielle standing just behind him, a final shopping bag in her arms. Her eyes swept the cabin’s interior, taking everything in as she analyzed their surroundings, the base from which she would lay their defense.

  “Make sure the fire’s completely out,” she instructed. “Close the chimney.” She turned her gaze to a nearby garbage bag stuffed with trash. “You shopped on your way up here,” she said to Sayeed.

  “At a gas station that had a convenience store attached. They didn’t have much but—”

  “How far away?” Danielle interrupted.

  “Ten, twelve miles maybe.”

  “When did you stop there?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “There’s a window broken in the front here.”

  “I didn’t have a key to the door.” Sayeed looked toward Ben. “They came so fast two nights ago, took us totally by surprise. The gunshots seemed to be coming from everywhere. The men guarding us tried to hold them back. Our mother herded my children down the stairs, making sure they stayed low.”

  “She had plenty of practice in Palestine,” Ben said softly.

  “She collapsed when she got to the bottom. From exhaustion, I thought, until I saw the blood. It was over so quickly. I had no time to say anything, no time to do anything but get my family out.”

  Danielle slid between Sayeed’s two somber children into the kitchen area of the cabin and began the task of unpacking the bags.

  “We need to get started,” she told them all.

  Danielle had not found everything she’d hoped for at the general store, but she’d found enough, and now she divided the items into different sections atop the counter and tables. Having inventoried these, she busied herself briefly with a check of the cabin’s interior to see what else she had available. The kitchen sink was porcelain, outfitted with a rubber stopper to plug the drain. There was a second sink in the bathroom, not far from an old-fashioned cast-iron tub and shower. The water didn’t work and plastic containers of bottled water covered most of the counter. The floor was badly discolored and rotting in several sections, evidence of a leaky roof. It must have been left in similar condition thirty-odd years ago, because a trio of rusty pails rested in three of the corners, their handles long frozen into place.

  “All right,” Danielle said, “let’s get to work.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 67

  T

  he cleaning products came first. Danielle instructed Sayeed’s wife, Irsi, and the two children as to the proper mixtures to prepare in the rusted pails. The powerful scents of ammonia and bleach filled the room instantly, burning her eyes. Ben started coughing and Danielle opened all the windows, letting the cold air blow through the cabin.

  Outside the sky was starting to darken, the sun sinking rapidly beneath the tree line.

  In the bathroom, Ben and Sayeed were busy dumping the fertilizer bags into the cast-iron bathtub, then adding gallon-sized containers of kerosene and stirring the mixture with a shovel handle until it matted into a paste.

  Danielle, meanwhile, was glad to find a pair of ancient, old-fashioned fire extinguishers tucked away in the back of a small closet. She dragged them out, unscrewed their tops, and dumped out whatever water there was inside that had not evaporated with the years.

  Then she drove the rental car down a slight hill at the edge of the forest to join Sayeed’s SUV, camouflaged by brush and trees. Even the minor grade would make backing the car out a challenge, but there would be plenty of room for all of them in the SUV, and Danielle had other plans for the rental car anyway.

  She returned to the house, lugging its battery with her, almost new and plenty powerful for the task required.

  “Show me the generator,” she said to Sayeed, while Ben continued to stir the compound in the bathtub into a smooth paste.

  “It’s broken.”

  “Show me.”

  Danielle got the generator working in twenty minutes. It clanked, clattered, and spewed gas fumes into the air from its slot in a furrow dug out from the underside of the cabin. Then she located the conduits running out of it into the house and sliced open some of the rubber shielding, exposing the wires. She strung yard after yard of wire toward her like fishing line, careful to leave untouched the lines running to the front of the cabin.

  By the time she brought the wires into the house with her, the others had completed their tasks. Danielle poured the contents of the three pails into the old-fashioned fire extinguishers and screwed their tops back on tight. Then she washed the pails out thoroughly in the waters of the bay, returning inside to fill them halfway with gasoline, which was then mixed with moth flakes.

  “Molotov cocktails,” Ben said, having come up against the homemade weapon often enough in the West Bank.

  “Not exactly,” Danielle told him, “but close.”

  Dusk was falling when she carried two of the pails down the steps and be
gan pouring their contents atop the ground. Sayeed dumped the contents of the third pail while his wife and children used a combination of shovels and rakes to make sure they were spread evenly. Outside in the crisp air, the harsh smell quickly faded, lingering no more than the stench left by a flooded car.

  Around back, Ben eased the wheelbarrow down the rickety dock toward the spot where his father had kept their skiff moored. He had been amazed to find it still tucked under the cabin, covered in canvas, where they’d stowed it upon last leaving the cabin over thirty years before, even more amazed to find it still whole.

  It made no sense until Ben considered the obvious, which had escaped him until this very moment: His mother not only had refused to sell the cabin, she also must have been returning periodically to tend to it. A few times a year, unbeknownst to Ben and, probably, Sayeed. Coming back here to relive those first happy months in America her own way.

  She wouldn’t even have stayed overnight. Probably just came early in the morning and left before dark, getting a cousin or friend to drive her here from Dearborn. Cleaning the skiff out before replacing the canvas atop it. Switching on the generator to keep it lubricated and giving the cabin a quick once-over. It could only have been she who set the pails on the floor to catch the rain where it fell through the leaky roof. But she must not have come recently, not in the past few years anyway, as evidenced by the damage to the floor.

  Ben wondered if she had finally tired of the process or been too worn down by her worsening arthritis to attempt it anymore. He wished he had known about this, yet respected that it was his mother’s way of dealing with the past. His had been to return to Palestine as his father had, Sayeed’s to help other Palestinians find a new life in America.

  Each in their own way, Ben realized, had been living a lie. They had clung to something that could not bring them what they wanted and had been betrayed in the process: Ben by the people he thought were his own, his brother by the terrorists who used him for the student visas he could provide. Even his mother, by the rotting wood and shingles that defied her attempts to keep at least something from the past unchanged.

  Leaving the wheelbarrow at the end of the dock, Ben returned to the skiff and dragged it down into the water. He climbed back onto the dock and hauled it with him to its mooring. He tied it down there and slid the wheelbarrow to the very edge. Inside was the smooth paste he had shoveled from the bathtub, and now he tilted the tip downward and watched the paste began to pour slowly down into the skiff.

  He was only following Danielle’s instructions, unsure exactly of how she planned to use it. He was in her world now, a foreign place he had touched only on the fringes. He hated the whole process for how dependent it made him feel, loved it because it brought the only time their relationship was unconditional. All else rendered meaningless by the demands of the moment. Nothing to separate them.

  But today was different. Today the lives of the last close relatives he had in the world were at stake. Watching even Sayeed yield to Danielle’s counsel made Ben appreciate her power and presence even more. The very things that had intimidated him when they first met eight years before now attracted him to her. He knew he shouldn’t confuse love with need, but it was just another complication in a relationship that had seen more than its share.

  When he came back inside, Ben found Danielle stringing wire through a hole she had drilled in one of the cabin’s front walls. She twirled the wires together and twisted them into place inside the guts of a battery-operated lantern. Then she fit the bottom of the lantern back into place and flicked it on.

  “I strung the wire from the top of the private road leading down here,” she explained. “A car drives over it, the connection breaks, causing the bulb to flicker.”

  “Ingenious.”

  “If it works,” Danielle said.

  Ben then watched her take another section of wire and loop it around the positive connection of the car battery she had placed near one of the rear windows.

  “What’s that for?” he asked her.

  “You’ll see,” Danielle replied, taking the wire with her out the back door toward the dock.

  * * * *

  Chapter 68

  N

  ight fell. They waited in darkness and silence.

  Ben’s niece and nephew were huddled with their mother in the back bedroom, the bed’s heavy wood frame upturned between them and the window to provide protection from flying glass. Sayeed sat poised in the rear of the cabin before the window overlooking the inlet of the bay circling round Twenty Mile Point. Ben and Danielle hovered near windows on either side of the cabin’s front door, their eyes never far from the lantern, which glowed softly in the fireplace so the light couldn’t be seen from the outside.

  Ben heard a shuffling sound and turned to find Sayeed crawling up alongside him. “We should tell my wife and children to run, get away as soon as it starts, Bayan,” he whispered.

  “That might be what the attackers’ plan is designed to accomplish,” Danielle said softly from the other side of the door. “Flush us out.”

  “They didn’t do that in Dearborn.”

  “This is different.”

  Sayeed shrugged and slipped back to the other side of the cabin. He’d been nothing but disapproving of her the only other time they had met. Tonight everything had changed.

  Danielle slid over to join Ben. “If I had killed Buchert in Pine Valley. . .”

  “Latif and Khalil would have found someone else to release the smallpox for them,” Ben said softly after her voice had drifted off.

  “Why not just do it themselves?”

  “Because they knew they’d be destroyed, once the plot was linked back to them. Buchert wouldn’t have cared. He had nothing to lose anymore; he hasn’t for almost a year now, thanks to us.”

  “Khalil used that to get Buchert to do his bidding,” Danielle told him. “Wipe out the other terrorists trapped by Operation Flypaper.”

  “But whoever killed Khalil has been behind this from the start. Everyone else were just pawns.”

  Ben’s comment brought Danielle back to the tale told by Colonel al-Asi’s informant, Hakim. “It’s the woman I told you about, the one who was at Khalil’s compound the day he was shot. I’m sure of it. She planned everything.”

  “Including an old Arab woman’s murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know who she is, don’t you?”

  “I have my suspicions,” Danielle told him, thinking of Layla Aziz Rahani, daughter of Blue Widow Hanna Frank. “But Colonel al-Asi knows something he didn’t tell me. Hyram Berger at the Israeli embassy too.”

  “What?”

  Before Danielle could answer him, the lantern in the fireplace flickered.

  * * * *

  Chapter 69

  I

  t’s time,” Danielle said to Ben, sliding over to the door. “Move closer to the window. Keep your head just high enough to peer out and don’t move it. In the dark, movement’s the only thing that can give you away.”

  She pulled an emergency road flare from her belt and held it in her hand, pressed tight to the door just to the side of the open mail slot. Ben had felt the wind coming through it all evening, never asking Danielle why she had removed the outside flap. Now he understood.

  Across the floor Sayeed held his position alongside the window overlooking the cabin’s rear. He turned toward Danielle and shook his head.

  “I see something,” Ben said softly. “Shapes moving into the clearing.”

  “How many?”

  “I can’t tell. They’re gone. . . . Wait, I see them again. Three, no, four, advancing toward the house, stopping to cover each other.”

  “Tell me when the lead one draws within ten feet of the front porch,” she instructed, second hand joined to the emergency flare now, ready to pop its fuse.

  Ben fought against the temptation to check on Sayeed in the cabin’s rear, keeping his focus out the window instead. The moonless darkness g
ave up little, just an occasional shapeless blur that could just as easily have been a swaying tree as a man.

  “There’s a man a dozen feet from the porch!” he reported, catching the slight glimmer of an assault rifle’s barrel.

  She signaled him quiet, mouthed, Any others?