The Blue Widows - [Kamal & Barnea 06]

by By Jon Land

  The entry doors opened again, allowing five men to enter, one standing head and shoulders above the others: Hassan.

  “Shipment of the vaccine starts tomorrow,” Layla told them, sliding away. “There’s nothing you can do to stop its distribution. America is desperate now to save itself from smallpox. Your little adventure in Minneapolis actually helped my cause more than hurt it: Now the whole country believes the smallpox is in the hands of a group, this People’s Brigade, that has every intention of using it. Lines at hospitals were around the block this morning, demanding a vaccine that waits in the Immutech warehouses. The two of you have done me a great service. I’m sorry you won’t live to see the results, as I will.”

  “And what of Saudi Arabia?” Danielle challenged. “Without U.S. dollars to buy your oil, how long will it be before poverty destroys everything men like your father built here? You seem willing to destroy your own world too.”

  “Let Saudi Arabia be destroyed so it can be remade in a different image,” Layla Aziz Rahani insisted, thinking hatefully of her brother Saed. “An image in which I could take my rightful place as my father’s heir. If only he could know I have done this for him, completed the work that consumed him for years, all that would change. I know it would.” Layla Aziz Rahani’s gaze tightened into a mixture of sadness and rage, her mouth puckered outward, her eyes blazing as she looked down at the inert body upon the bed. “His heart was broken long before his body followed. He honestly loved our mother, was never genuinely happy again after that night in London. One of his children stolen from him, a wife who had betrayed him in the worst way imaginable, and finally my . . . violation. What choice did he have?”

  Layla Aziz Rahani backed away from the bed as four of the gunmen who had entered the room edged forward, all but Hassan, who held his ground by the door. “Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m needed elsewhere.”

  Danielle lunged to the head of Abdullah Aziz Rahani’s bed, her fingers locked on his throat, guns steadying upon her. “Tell them to back off, my sister.”

  But the look on Layla’s face told her she had badly miscalculated, even before Ben spoke.

  “That’s what she wants, Danielle,” he said with his eyes on Layla. “For you to do what she can’t. Don’t give her the satisfaction.”

  Danielle eased her fingers away slowly, backed off.

  “You’re smart for a Palestinian,” Layla Aziz Rahani said to Ben. “Smart enough to realize that Israel won’t last long once America falls. I’m doing your people a favor. With America gone, Israel will be overrun once and for all, as it should have been in 1973.” She backpedaled toward the double doors, stopping briefly in Hassan’s huge shadow. “Enjoy your eternities, both of you. Come, Hassan, there is somewhere we must be.”

  The huge, one-eyed man stepped from the room with her and closed the door behind them, leaving the four gunmen alone with Ben and Danielle. The look in their eyes told her it was going to end here and now, with Abdullah Aziz Rahani, what was left of him anyway, bearing silent witness. Two of the gunmen started to turn their guns on Ben, while the other pair kept theirs fixed on Danielle.

  The door through which the nurse had disappeared minutes earlier opened inward, and Marta reemerged wheeling a cart containing a large bowl and sponges. She headed straight for Abdullah Aziz Rahani, ignoring the men holding guns on Ben and Danielle.

  “Get out of here, you wretch!” one of them spat at her in Arabic.

  But Marta kept right on wheeling the cart, stopping only when she reached the far side of the bed.

  “I said—”

  A hail of silenced gunfire swallowed his words, muzzle flashes bursting from a weapon hidden inside Marta’s cart. Ben and Danielle instinctively threw themselves to the floor, the soft spits echoing in their ears. Spent shells rattled against the tile, the four gunmen stitched by bullets.

  Ben and Danielle watched them fall, then turned toward Marta as she yanked a submachine gun from beneath the cloth covering the cart. Gun smoke wafted through the air, its acrid, sulfur smell overpowering that of the blood that had just begun to rise. The nurse kept one hand coiled around the submachine gun while the other slowly stripped off her veil.

  Danielle gasped at the sight of the horribly scarred face revealed beneath it.

  Marta was Hanna Frank.

  * * * *

  Chapter 90

  L

  ittle resemblance to Hanna Frank remained from the photo of her Berger had given Danielle, except for the eyes. Still bright —/ and strong, piercing in their intensity.

  The woman’s face was grotesquely misshapen, pocked by scar tissue that had formed over jagged shards of bone that had never healed properly. It was a face bathed in the shadows formed by the ridges and fissures that appeared upon and beneath a horribly misshapen forehead. Her cheeks were crusted with marble-sized lumps. Her mouth was cracked perpetually open on one side and bent to the left, her jaws hanging low and loose as though permanently unhinged.

  Danielle found herself back on her feet, unable to tear her eyes away, yet she didn’t find the sight of Hanna ugly or revolting at all. Ben stood just to her side, his arm gripped tightly around both her shoulders.

  “Come, you must leave,” Hanna Frank said, her voice a lispy, crackling garble.

  Danielle couldn’t move, felt as if she were floating.

  “I know a secret route,” the woman continued, stowing her submachine gun atop the cart. “But we must hurry, before they check the room.”

  Danielle’s gaze locked with hers, and for that moment she saw Hanna Frank as the beautiful woman with whom both Abdullah Aziz Rahani and Yakov Barnea had fallen in love. She felt tears brimming in her eyes. She wanted to embrace Hanna Frank, found the desire but not the will. Her emotions clashed. She didn’t know what to feel for this stranger who was her real mother and had lived a life of pain, isolation, and sacrifice that had begun with Operation Blue Widow. She had given so much, lost so much, and gained nothing in return from the night Danielle had been stuffed into the back of a cab and driven off to begin a new life. Danielle imagined Hanna Frank waiting in Saudi Arabia for all these years after Yakov Barnea had rescued her, living off funds channeled somehow from Zanah Fahury, just for the opportunity to complete her mission, which at last had come. She had returned to the Rahani palace in the guise of a nurse, tending to her husband in the very room where she’d overhead mention of the plot to invade Israel in 1973.

  “Danielle,” Ben said softly, whispering in her ear. “Danielle.”

  It occurred to her then, suddenly, all that her father had accomplished. The terrible truths he’d been forced to keep along the way, the sacrifices that dominated his life too. But thanks to Hanna Frank he had saved Israel.

  Just as it was left to Danielle today to save much, much more.

  She found her feet, her tongue, was about to speak, when the woman her father had turned into Anna Pagent pulled the veil back over her face and moved for the door at the head of Abdullah Aziz Rahani’s bed. She stopped when she reached it and lifted the veil from her twisted mouth once more.

  “You must leave now, my daughter,” she said from the doorway, her voice cracking and raw, as if she were unused to speaking. “There’s a car waiting for you.”

  Ben could see the pain in Danielle’s eyes, the shock that had turned her perpetually even expression into a mask of hesitance and uncertainty. He tucked into his belt a pistol lifted from a dead gunman and started to ease Danielle toward the stairway beyond the frail figure of Hanna Frank.

  “I should have killed Layla,” her real mother told her, as they drew closer. “A hundred times I had the chance, and I could never do it.” Her eyes turned downward, embarrassed. “Any more than I could let them kill you.”

  “I understand.” Danielle nodded. She wanted so much to take Hanna Frank into her arms and lose herself in the hope that the embrace might somehow compensate for all the lost years. Before she could, though, someone began pounding on the entrance t
o Abdullah Aziz Rahani’s domain.

  “Go. Go and stop her,” Hanna Frank said, her eyes regaining their intensity. “Otherwise, all this was for nothing.”

  Once again, Hanna Frank pulled the veil back over her face and for a brief, fleeting moment Danielle again saw her as the beautiful woman with whom her father had fallen in love. She stepped back and let Ben and Danielle pass her, holding Danielle’s gaze until she closed the door behind them.

  The stairs wound downward, spilling out at a service entrance to the palace where a Mercedes was warmed and ready. Ben moved around to the driver’s side, while Danielle took a last look at the windows above, thought she briefly glimpsed the figure of Hanna Frank looking down at them.

  “Danielle,” Ben called softly. “Danielle, get in. We’ve got to go.”

  He hurried back around the car and eased her toward the passenger door. He opened it for her and guided her in.

  “Come on,” Ben said, sliding behind the wheel, “let’s finish your mother’s work.”

  A set of windows four stories above blew out in a deafening blast, flames chasing the glass into the air. A secondary explosion coughed more flames outward, dragging black smoke with them.

  An alarm began to wail. Men were shouting and screaming.

  The acrid stench of smoke reached Danielle in the passenger seat of the Mercedes, where she suddenly found herself. She saw the tinted window beside her roll electronically upward and placed her hands against it, reaching for the woman who had once been her mother, as Ben turned the key and gave the big car gas.

  But he waited until the guards at the front gate had charged up the drive toward the palace before screeching forward. He felt the Mercedes buck slightly when he floored the accelerator and crashed through the gate. The windshield shattered, and he turned away from the wheel, regaining control just before the big car pitched off the road.

  He drove straight to the airport, Danielle silent and transfixed next to him.

  “What about al-Asi?” she said finally.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll probably beat us out of the country.”

  “We’ve got to call Najarian.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s got to get to somebody in Washington. Get production at that pharmaceutical plant suspended. Get the whole place shut down.”

  “He will.”

  Danielle stared through the windshield. “My father and Hanna Frank loved each other, Ben. I could see it in her eyes.”

  “Your father loved your mother too.”

  “This was different. Hanna Frank refused to come back to Israel because she knew it would destroy everything he was, everything he had built. She didn’t want him responsible for her too; she’d already given him me. So she did the only thing she could: waited for the opportunity to complete her mission. Find her way back into the Rahani palace, even though there was no one left to report to.”

  “Both our fathers were good at keeping secrets,” Ben told her.

  “And now both our mothers are dead.”

  “Yours died in Israel ten years ago, Danielle.”

  Danielle found a phone built into the console, dialed John Najarian’s secure cell number, and put him on the speaker.

  “Ben, where the hell are you?” came Najarian’s gruff greeting.

  “Saudi Arabia, on our way to England.”

  “England?”

  “Call the secretary of state, John, and tell him to have his people meet us at the Immutech Pharmaceuticals plant in Reading tomorrow morning.”

  “Can I tell him why?” Najarian asked.

  “To save the country.”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Chapter 91

  T

  he first of the trucks arrived at Immutech Pharmaceuticals’ production plant at nine a.m. sharp. A line of them stretched back as far as the eye could see along the access road leading to the complex, and a steady stream was visible exiting the nearby M-4.

  The whole process should have started days ago, lamented Layla Aziz Rahani as she viewed the trucks from inside the gate. But rearranging flights out of Heathrow Airport to accommodate the fleet of C-130 transports onto which the vaccine would be loaded had proven more difficult and time-consuming than anticipated.

  Layla Aziz Rahani reveled in the reports coming from America of the widespread panic that had risen in the aftermath of smallpox being found at the Mall of America. Terrified citizens were demanding a response, leaving Washington with no choice but to assure them mass inoculations of the vaccine would begin in as little as ten days’ time. The American public didn’t want to hear about side effects, two-week incubation period, or the greatest public health crisis in U.S. history. They just wanted their shots.

  And Layla Aziz Rahani would make sure there was a dose for each and every one of them.

  Ben and Danielle stood near the cluster of press personnel just outside the entrance to the Immutech Pharmaceuticals complex. They had flown into London’s Heathrow Airport the night before. From there they had rented a car and driven the short distance to Reading, finding a room well past midnight at a small bed-and-breakfast not far from the famed Reading School.

  The vaccine conceived to destroy the United States could never be permitted to leave Immutech. At any moment, whomever John Najarian had arranged to have dispatched from the State Department would arrive to begin the process of shutting down the production process and sealing off the facility.

  Ben checked his watch nervously again. “They should have been here by now.”

  “They could be inside the facility already, laying the groundwork.”

  “Without knowing the specifics?”

  “Najarian’s a persuasive man, Ben. I’m sure he knew what to say.”

  Her words didn’t satisfy him. “I’m going back to the car, give John another call.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Danielle said, and watched Ben walk down the road to where they had parked their rental car.

  Her thoughts returned to Hanna Frank, Marta, as she watched him go. She had blown up the room back at the palace to cover up the truth of what had transpired, a final sacrifice by a woman who had already given up everything. Danielle stood in awe of what her real mother had managed to accomplish heroically and humbly, never receiving any credit for her tragic mission. It made Danielle reflect on her own life, the risks she had taken and danger she accepted to fight for the State of Israel. She, too, had made sacrifices, although nothing like those made by Hanna Frank. The similarities between them added to the sadness Danielle had felt since her eyes locked with her mother’s that last time on the stairwell. She hadn’t wanted to leave her alone; it didn’t seem fair. Hanna Frank had no one. Danielle, at least, had Ben.

  She wished she could find some memory of this woman hidden in the deepest recesses of her mind. But the woman who became Anna Pagent, American college student, remained a specter, a shadow, purged from her mind long ago. Maybe the terror of that final night in London had triggered the block. It was as though she had never been Kavi. As though Kavi had never existed.

  “Ms. Barnea?” The voice shook her from her daze, and she found herself facing a tall man with an Immutech security badge dangling from his neck. Four other broad-shouldered men, virtual clones of each other, stood subserviently behind him.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been asked to escort you inside. Representatives of the U.S. State Department are waiting for you.”

  Danielle cast her gaze down the road. “We should wait for Mr. Kamal to return. He’s gone to the car to—”

  “I have my orders, ma’am,” the man interrupted. “Time is of the essence, as I’m sure you’ll understand. I’ll leave one of my men behind to wait for Mr. Kamal.”

  Something in his tone was slightly off, but his eyes proved the giveaway, more intense than they should have been. Danielle felt her senses sharpen. If she could take this man and the others by surprise . . .

  Then she saw the gun in his hand.<
br />
  “If you’ll just come with me, Ms. Barnea.”

  “Mr. Najarian’s line,” a voice answered.

  “Where’s John?” Ben asked.

  “Who is this, please?”

  “Just put Mr. Najarian on the line.”

  “If you’ll just tell me—”

  “Shut up and get Najarian for me. This is an emergency!”

  “I’ll say it is,” the man replied, his tone sharpening slightly. “John Najarian was found dead in his office six hours ago.”