The Jericho Pact

by Rachel Lee

  Hassan, he thought, had never committed a violent act in his life, yet he was being treated as a criminal. In the wake of the tragedy in Nice, security was especially tight, and every Muslim passenger was subjected to pat-down searches for weapons, even women and children. It was a cruel religious violation, for it was forbidden for any man but her husband to touch a woman. Hassan had had to hold Ali back while the guard’s hands roamed over his own wife, probing every possible place where she might secrete a weapon, save for that most intimate of places. It had looked to Ali—and to Ahmed—like something barely short of an act of rape. Yet to resist was to risk worse for them all.

  Now Hassan held his wife’s sobbing form against him, cooing gently to her in Arabic, reassuring her that both Allah and he understood that she had not violated any law or vow in permitting the search, that he still loved her, that this was for the safety of everyone on the train, so that no one would open fire and risk the lives of all, begging her to forgive him for permitting the search.

  Every word burned in Ahmed’s ears and in his soul, but he listened to Hassan offer them with every ounce of feeling he could draw from his wounded heart. She needed to hear them, and he needed to say them, however hollow they might sound.

  When her sobbing finally stilled, Hassan looked over at Ali. His son’s eyes filled with tears. But in that moment, for the first time in what seemed like months, they were not tears of rage.

  “Ali,” he said softly, “it will be all right.”

  “Does Allah still love us?” Ali asked. “How could a god who loves us permit this?”

  Ahmed had more than once asked himself that same question. In what ways had he turned from the will of Allah? In what ways had he abandoned the words of the Prophet, blessings be upon him? How had the followers of Islam sinned so greatly that they deserved such treatment?

  In the end, he could find no answer. He had tried to live a faithful life. So had Hassan. Hassan’s family had performed the haj just two years ago, an experience he had described as the most beautiful of his life. He said the daily prayers. He treated both family and stranger with peace and justice. And while Ali had been drawn into the wrong crowd of young men and had committed some minor acts of vandalism in recent weeks, surely Allah would not trample Hassan’s family for the common misdeeds of youth?

  “Yes, Ali,” Ahmed heard himself say. “Allah still loves us. Even the Prophet was reviled by some. The greatest of the Shi’a saints, after whom you are named, was murdered by enemies. Did Allah not love him and welcome him into heaven?”

  “I…I do not want to go to heaven yet, Ahmed.”

  Ahmed watched as Hassan opened his other arm, inviting his son—once an infant whom he cradled, now a young man—to join in the embrace. “In sh’Allah, Ali. It will be as Allah wills. Let us pray that His will is merciful. But we must accept that it may be otherwise.”

  Ali crossed the small compartment and sat between his parents, his breath ragged, his fists clenching both his father’s robe and his mother’s, as if searching for some stone of stability in the raging sea that had enveloped them.

  “I am sorry, Father.”

  “Shhhhh,” Hassan whispered. “You need not.”

  “I am sorry to Allah for my sins.”

  “I know, my son,” Hassan said. “And Allah knows this, as well.”

  “Please forgive me?” Ali whispered.

  “You were always forgiven,” Hassan said. “Allah is merciful. I can be no less.”

  Ahmed turned away, feeling the tears sting his eyes.

  Allah is merciful.

  Did he still believe that?

  Paris, France

  Renate watched as Michel Sedan had a leisurely lunch at La Rive Gauche café. He was sharing his last meal with a woman. She knew—both from their behavior and from the photographs she had committed to memory—that this woman was not Sedan’s wife. Yet it was obvious that Sedan had designs on her.

  It was obvious in the way his hand rested on hers, in the way his eyes met hers, in the subtle smile that he let filter through at random moments. While she could not hear their conversation over the chatter of the car radio, even a blind man could have seen that Sedan hoped to take this woman to bed.

  Just as he had done with Margarite.

  Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t fall for the wiles of this viper.

  Just as those liaisons had led to Margarite’s death, this woman would die if she decided to join Sedan in a pied-à-terre. Renate was going to kill Sedan. If the woman was with him, Renate would kill them both. It was not that she held any ill will for the woman. It was simply that she could not risk leaving a live witness.

  “She’s pretty,” Lawton said.

  “Is she?” Renate asked.

  “Renate, you can’t.”

  “He may leave us no choice.”

  Lawton sighed. “There are always choices, Renate.”

  She looked at him. “Michel Sedan must die.”

  41

  Neumühl, Germany

  H ans Neufel performed a final inspection of his Leopard II tank. Every link of track had been checked, every fitting sealed, every vision port and sight lens cleaned, every round of ammunition counted and stacked. The vehicle was fully fueled and ready for combat.

  And, save for young Schiffer, so were his men. They had turned to their duties with a quiet precision, showing none of the bravado, none of the dark humor, that had been their former norm. They knew what lay ahead, what it would mean to kill. They had faced the threat of death, and while they were still afraid, as any sane man would be, they simply refused to let that fear control them.

  Save for young Schiffer, who sat in his loader’s chair, eyes wide, palms sweaty. For a moment the young soldier’s posture reminded Neufel of how he had felt the first time he had seen a dentist, and he fought down the urge to laugh. Laughing at Schiffer would not make it better. His fear was both real and rational.

  “Wir werden okay,” Neufel said, patting Schiffer’s shoulder. We will be okay.

  “Are you sure, Sergeant?” Schiffer asked.

  The question was both sincere and absurd. Of course Neufel could not promise the young man that he wouldn’t die on this day. The platoon was preparing to assault the village of Neumühl to drive out the French infiltrators. The attack would be preceded by a series of air strikes that, the battalion commander had assured them, would paralyze the French. The air strikes would be followed by several salvoes of the battalion’s artillery, fifteen-centimeter howitzers firing ICM—Improved Conventional Munitions—shells that would burst apart into bomblets as they neared the ground, each bomblet then exploding and sending fiery metal fragments tearing through flesh and bone, multiplying the terror of the air strikes.

  Only then would Neufel’s tank roll forward, blasting apart strongpoints with its cannon, dealing death to the exposed enemy from its twin machine guns.

  It was a small village. The attack should take less than an hour. And, if the Typhoon fighter-bombers and the artillery were accurate, if the timing was perfect, if the French had not brought forward antitank guided missiles or heavy armor that German intelligence had not yet seen, if, if, if…

  If a million “ifs” had been met, and if they were lucky, then yes, Neufel could give the guarantee Schiffer wanted. The problem with war was that all those “ifs” were never met. Young Schiffer knew all too well that he was sitting in a seat formerly occupied by a dead man.

  But Neufel could not allow Schiffer to be overwhelmed by such thoughts. Fear was contagious in battle—and deadly. Neufel needed Schiffer to be confident, not only for his own safety but for the safety of the crew and the platoon.

  To tell Schiffer the painful truth, that there was no way to guarantee his survival, would serve no purpose. So Neufel lied.

  “Ja, Schiffer. I’m sure.”

  Schiffer paused for a moment, then nodded. “I trust you.”

  Neufel nodded and looked into his weapon sight, not because there was an
ything to see, but simply so Schiffer could not see the pain in his face.

  Rome, Italy

  The buzz spread through the crowd, and Veltroni watched as the people parted. It was not for himself that they parted but for the German who stood beside him, a man whose face was fixed with a determined gaze.

  The Holy Father. At a train station.

  Normally such an appearance would have been scheduled weeks in advance, the crowd carefully searched, barricades manned by Vatican guards, an elegant podium erected from which the Pontiff could offer blessings at a safe distance. In the wake of the attempted assassination of John Paul II, security had become a major planning function of any papal appearance.

  But not today. Today the Pope had traveled to the train station not in the Plexiglas-enclosed bubble of what was commonly known as the Popemobile but in a common sedan driven by Veltroni himself. The Holy Father swept aside the objections of both cardinals and security men who claimed that the danger was too great. In the face of war, the danger was too great for anything else.

  The Pope reached the edge of the platform, directly in front of the removal train into which Italian Muslims were still being packed, and lifted a bullhorn.

  “Stop!” he commanded.

  Every face—Muslim, Christian, citizen and guard—froze in an instant. A palpable silence swept through the crowd, as if the air had been taken away, leaving each of them to hold his breath.

  “The Torah prescribes an eye for an eye,” the Pope continued. “Yet as Mahatma Gandhi said, if each man takes an eye for an eye, the whole world will be blind. We must now choose whether to live in blind darkness or in light. Here and now, at this station, with these people, we must choose whether to extract an eye for an eye, or to forgive, as our Savior commanded, seventy times seven. We cannot avoid a choice. Each of you will choose how to act. Each of you will decide to forgive…or to be blind.”

  Paris, France

  The woman had not accepted Sedan’s invitation, and now the French policeman strolled along the Left Bank, perhaps disappointed, perhaps wondering what else he could have said so that he might now be in her arms rather than alone.

  Or perhaps he had already forgotten her.

  Renate neither knew nor cared.

  Fifteen meters ahead, Sedan would turn down a quiet street, one that bent sharply to the left and offered no clear lines of sight from the more traveled avenues. When he did, Renate would quicken her pace, nearing to within a meter or two as he made the left turn. She would lift the SIG Sauer that now rested in the cloth shopping bag hanging from her shoulder. At that range, she would not need to take careful aim. She would not miss.

  Rome, Italy

  Ahmed opened the window and leaned out, only meters away from a man who, until that moment, had been only a face on the television or in a newspaper. A man to whom Ahmed had given little thought, the leader of another faith whose history was interwoven with his own and yet was as alien to him as the far side of the moon.

  “The same God created all of us, did he not?” the Pope was asking the crowd. “Did not Christ pray on the cross, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Do you not know that ‘Eloi’ was but the Aramaic pronunciation of the Arabic word ‘Allah’?”

  Ahmed drew a breath. Had he heard this man correctly? On the platform outside the train, others seemed to be asking themselves the same question.

  “Yes, it is true,” the Pope continued. “Christ prayed to the same God as our Muslim brothers and sisters. And if Christ were standing here, watching this, he might call out again, ‘Allah, Allah, lama sabachtani?’ Why have you forsaken me? For as I watch this, as I have seen the rise of hate and killing in these past months, I must wonder if God has forsaken us. If God has left us with nothing but the will to kill each other, in ones and tens and hundreds and thousands, until the dead number in the millions for a future generation to mourn in disbelief. Will this be the legacy of our generation? To recreate the most heinous sins of the past? To leave our grandchildren shaking their heads at our cruelty? Has God forsaken us?”

  Ahmed found himself squeezed between Hassan and Ali. They were not alone. This holy man was asking the same question Ali had asked, the same question Ahmed had pondered in these dark days.

  Had Allah forsaken them to their own evil?

  Paris, France

  Lawton barely heard the Pope’s words, broadcast on the car radio, as he followed behind Renate. Ten meters and Sedan would turn down the alley to his death. Yet something in the words penetrated his concentration, the translator’s voice following the rhythm and pitch of the Pontiff and, somehow, carrying Lawton back to a small parish church in Michigan, where he had sat impatiently through sermons, waiting for the Mass to end so he could go home to eat his lunch and watch football.

  He hadn’t thought any of what he had heard from the lectern had broken through to a young mind bent on food and pondering whether the Detroit Lions might win that week.

  But it had, he realized.

  His entire life had been dedicated to intervening in the cycle of violence that was the human existence. He was not an avenger. He sought no eye for the eyes taken, save for the blind eyes of Lady Justice, her judgment to be administered equally to all with dispassion, reason and, yes, mercy.

  Renate, too, had committed herself to that ideal, vain though it might seem at times. For the alternative was, as the Pope had quoted, an eye for an eye until all were blind. There was no guarantee that they could purge the darkness in the world. But they need not become it.

  He eased down on the accelerator and rolled down his window. He must stop this. This was not justice. This was simple murder.

  Rome, Italy

  Cardinal Estevan stood in the crowd, in mufti, watching the Pope. The German was giving a good speech, Estevan thought. He was now laying out in detail the evil behind Soult’s plans, the dark machinations that had led to this moment on a train platform in Rome, the way the people of Europe had been manipulated into hatred by a man bent by and toward cruel ambition. Fact piled upon fact, detail upon detail, until they reached a critical mass that did not rely on the documentation the Vatican would doubtless produce later that day. The case was made in the hearts and minds of the people listening.

  They had been lied to in the cruelest of ways, led into the most horrible of crimes.

  Every eye at the station was riveted, every mind captivated. That, Estevan realized, was power. The power to seize every mind and bend it to his will. It was a power he would now have, save for the bungling of Veltroni’s priest. Still, he would have it soon.

  He looked across the platform at the young man in a gray windbreaker, mere meters from the Pope, to the side and behind. He had chosen the man carefully. This was too important. The man looked at Estevan questioningly, but Estevan shook his head.

  Not yet.

  Paris, France

  Renate heard the car accelerate. What was Lawton doing? Sedan was a traitor, but he was a policeman. He would certainly notice a car following on his heels. He would turn, here on the busy street, where Renate would have no opportunity to complete the mission.

  Renate put a hand behind her back, palm open and pushing away, signaling Lawton to slow down. She could not take her eyes off the target now, could not know whether Lawton saw the signal. Surely he must have, for his role was to watch her rather than the target. Yet still he drew nearer. She could see the tension rising in the muscles of Sedan’s neck, his subconscious mind reacting to a danger he could not yet articulate.

  But he turned down the alley regardless.

  Perhaps he ignored the niggle at the back of his mind. Perhaps he was still distracted by thoughts of the woman he had hoped to bed.

  It did not matter, Renate thought. Whatever his reason—fantasy, inattention or sheer habit—Michel Sedan had sealed his fate.

  She quickened her pace, rising slightly onto the balls of her feet, the soles of her jogging shoes rolling smoothly and sile
ntly over the pavement with each step. Almost without thinking, she thumbed off the safety on the pistol.

  Now only two meters ahead, Sedan followed the left-hand bend of the narrow street, and Renate lifted the bag that concealed the pistol.

  Her right foot swept over a piece of broken glass, a faint but discernible crunch that finally drew Sedan’s mind into the present, the final present he would ever know. He turned and looked at her, looked at the raised bag, the form of the pistol clearly visible through the thin fabric, his eyebrows arched in a question.

  “For Margarite,” Renate whispered.

  She squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. Then again.

  He crumpled to the pavement, two holes in his chest, a third between eyes that would never again see a dawn.

  Renate took her hand from the bag and backed out of the alley, forcing her posture to be that of a confused woman moving away from some unknown danger, lest anyone take a passing glance in the moments before she climbed into the car.

  As she reached the end of the alley, she kept her focus on the car, not wanting to arouse suspicion by looking around for witnesses. She opened the car door and climbed in, dropping the bag to the floor between her feet, closing the door, fastening her seat belt, as if Lawton were picking her up from a trip to the grocery.

  Lawton didn’t notice her at first, focused as he was on the Pope’s speech.

  “We must choose life over death, light over blindness,” the German pontiff said, his voice rising in a firm crescendo. “We must stand now and say, in the Hebrew, ‘Lo od!’ Never again!”

  The history was not lost on Lawton. For the Pope—a German—to speak that admonition in Hebrew left no doubt what he meant. Fourteen million massacred, and Europe on the brink of repeating that tragedy.

  Never again.