Land, Jon

by [Kamal

  “I think you were having a nightmare.”

  “How . . . long was I out?”

  “A few minutes.”

  Ben checked his watch. “More like an hour.” He noted the rain was mirage, just as the figure of Jenny had been.

  Tawil shrugged. “Haven’t seen a soul. Quiet night.”

  “No kid?”

  “No kid.” He shifted toward the door on the passenger side. “I need to take a piss.”

  “Glad to cover for you,” Ben tried to joke. He cleared his throat.

  Tawil climbed out and walked around the car to Ben’s open -window. “You sure you’re all right, sidi?”

  “Just tired.”

  “This isn’t going anywhere. We should call it a night.”

  “We’ll discuss it when you get back.”

  Ben ran his hands over his face, tried to squeeze the life back into himself. He sighed loudly and massaged his eyelids. Realizing how stiff he felt, he climbed out of the car and stretched, then leaned against the door as he breathed deeply.

  A shuffling sound turned his attention up the street. He saw the shape of a woman clinging to the shadows, scampering with her eyes darting behind her as if to check for a pursuer.

  Ben moved away from the car, suddenly alert, wondering if it might be al-Diib she was fleeing, just as the woman’s eyes found him fearfully.

  “Help me,” she mouthed, and Ben started her way, drawing his gun.

  He passed the alley where al-Diib had struck the night before. The little of the yellow crime-scene tape that had survived the day flapped luminously in the breeze. He drew closer to the woman, peering beyond her into the night toward whoever she might have been fleeing.

  “It’s all right,” he started. “I’m a—”

  Ben felt the presence of someone coming up behind him in time to duck just as a powerful arm tried for a grasp around his throat. His hands snapped backward and closed on a thick head of hair, yanking as he dropped to one knee and letting his gun go flying.

  The frame of a large man carried up and over him, slamming down hard on the road surface; then instantly the man tried to right himself. Ben saw he had a knife and kicked it from his hand before the man could straighten up, wondering how close the blade had come to his throat a moment before. The knife clanged against the pavement and bounced. The man was scampering sideways to retrieve it when Tawil’s voice froze him.

  “Don’t move!”

  The young officer stood slightly off to the left, his nine-millimeter pistol aimed directly for the man, whose hand quivered within reach of his blade.

  “Touch it and I will shoot!”

  Ben started forward warily. “That’s all right, Issa. I have everything under control.”

  In one sudden, swift motion, he grabbed the man by the lapels and propelled him backward until his shoulders slammed against the nearest storefront’s shuttered exterior. Ben’s head ached with rage. He could feel his anger simmering over, was only vaguely conscious of the assailant’s skull ping-ponging off the shutter.

  A pair of surprisingly powerful hands grasped his shoulders from behind, held them.

  “Let him go, sidi,” said Tawil.

  Ben released his grip. The man slumped down. A thin trail of blood followed him. The shutter showed a series of cracks down its center.

  “Zaiyel mara! Zaiyel mara!” the woman ranted, shouting the worst of all Arab insults, enough to make Tawil start forward with his gun rising purposefully.

  Ben cut in front of him, while she scraped across the dirt-strewn street with her boot, searching for the discarded knife probably.

  “It’s over here,” Ben said, lifting up his shoe to reveal the knife beneath it.

  The woman stormed toward him. “I spit on you, cop!”

  She tried, but the spittle fell short.

  “Issa,” Ben spoke, calm again, “I believe we have captured a prostitute here. Would you care to quote her the punishment for her crime?”

  “In the time of my grandfather, the first offense was punishable by the slicing off of a nipple. The second by the loss of the entire breast.”

  The woman spat again.

  “But we’ve become far more civilized in recent months, have we not?”

  “We have indeed, Inspector. I believe the punishment now is a mere twenty years in jail. Mandatory.”

  “I’m not a whore!” the woman ranted.

  “With this scam you and your friend are working, you might as well be.” Ben drew closer. “A man was killed here last night, sliced up with a knife.” His foot rattled the discarded blade across the pavement. “Wouldn’t be too hard for Officer Tawil and me to make a case against you and your friend. Who would argue? Who would believe otherwise? Easiest solution. And the most convenient. The penalty for that is—”

  “All right!” she relented. “What do you want to know?”

  “You were seen on this street last night,” Ben lied. “You must have seen something. I want to know what it was.”

  “No, not me!” Her voice lowered. “Someone else.”

  “Someone else pulling this same scam? Who?”

  She took a deep breath. “Shanzi. She was the one. I heard her talking tonight, in Ramallah.”

  “Where can I find her tomorrow?”

  “Same place as me: the Jalazon refugee camp.”

  “The one under curfew?”

  “There are ways to get around that.”

  “I think you’d better head back there now,” Ben ordered. He heard a moan and saw her accomplice struggling to rise. “And take your friend with you.”

  She took a few steps and started to kneel.

  “Leave the knife,” he told her.

  Tawil moved between Ben and the woman. “You were very lucky tonight. Praise Allah for His blessing and make sure we never see you on this street again.”

  She hoisted her accomplice to his feet and dragged him off, glaring back hatefully.

  “A long day, Inspector,” Tawil commented when they were gone.

  “But well worth it, my young friend,” Ben replied. “We have two potential witnesses now, which is two more than any of these murders has ever had before.”

  * * * *

  B

  en returned to his apartment feeling far more optimistic than he had when he set out earlier in the evening. First thing tomorrow—actually, this—morning he would pay a visit to the Jalazon refugee camp in search of the woman who claimed to have been on Jaffa Street around the time of the murder.

  And he would also have to look into Major Nabril al Asi’s investigation of Dalia Mikhail. Anytime the Protective Security Service got involved in something, it was serious. Maybe Ben could convince her to forego her letter writing for a while, at least temper her words enough to get al-Asi to back off. The major’s visit to Ben early that evening may have actually been a warning, cloaked in the language of a threat al-Asi was more comfortable with.

  Ben eased his key into the door and pushed it open. As he started for the stairs, he noticed the light was out in the lobby and felt his way through the darkness.

  The thump of a misplaced footstep sounded. Ben sensed movement in time to twist, and the move saved his skull from the full impact of the club. The blow, though glancing, spun him toward the wall, where a pair of hands grabbed him at the shoulders and slammed him face-first into the plaster.

  His forehead hit first, sizzling stars exploding before his eyes. Ben lashed his arms backward, yanking himself from the grasp. It closed on him again, this time from the front, and something that felt like steel rammed into his stomach. He doubled over, gasping but still flailing with his hands until an arm closed over his windpipe and hot breath found his ear.

  “You’re going to die.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 17

  E

  asy!” a newvoice ordered.“We needhim alive!Bring him outside! Quick!”

  Ben felt himself dragged across the floor, out through the door. A van screeche
d to a halt at the curbside, its rear doors thrown open. He was hoisted through, stretched out horizontally, his face held against a musty, dank carpet. The van sagged as several more men pulled themselves inside. Ben heard the rear doors slam and then a hand slap against the cab to signal the driver.

  “Go!” The same voice.

  The van tore away, tires screaming against the pavement. One set of arms jerked him upward while another fastened a hood over his face.

  “Now?” from a new voice.

  “Wait till we’re out of town,” returned the one he recognized. Authoritative, slightly nasal.

  Ben shifted.

  “Tie his hands!” The voice was well known to him now, obviously belonged to the leader.

  He could feel someone shifting toward him, grasping his hands and clumsily bringing them together as the van bobbed across Jericho’s decaying streets. Thin rope bound his wrists together, the knot digging into his flesh.

  The first miles passed in silence. He could feel the road settle and then begin to climb as they headed up from the valley in which Jericho was contained. Ben knew better than to speak first. This kind of brazen act was right up Hamas’s alley, but with the enemies he had made in the West Bank it could have been anyone.

  “Check behind us,” the voice of the leader ordered. “Anything?”

  “Clear.”

  A pair of hands closed on Ben’s lapels and snapped him forward.

  “You know who we are?” the leader shot at him, close enough for Ben to feel his breath through the hood.

  “No.”

  “Take a guess, you American shit.”

  “Hamas.”

  “Very good. You should never have come to our country. You don’t belong here. Consider yourself exiled, either dead or alive—your choice.”

  Ben felt himself thrust backward and the back of his hooded head slammed against the cab wall.

  “Well?” the voice taunted. “Which is it, dead or alive?”

  “You tell me,” Ben managed.

  “I will tell you what you have to do to live. You have to talk to us. You have to tell the truth. You have to give us what we want.”

  “In that order?”

  A backhand spun his face to the left. “I don’t like you already. Don’t give me reason to like you even less. The man who was found murdered yesterday morning, where are his personal effects? Identification, papers ...”

  “There weren’t any.”

  Another backhand slashed across Ben’s right cheek. “Liar! We want them, American. They are your passport to staying alive. I will ask you again. What have you done with the papers he was carrying?”

  “Why do you care?”

  The leader pounced on Ben and jammed a forearm beneath his throat, leaving him just enough air to breathe. “It is not your business why I care. Your business is what I want, and that is answers.”

  The van took a bump hard. Ben felt his bound arms jostled upward, wrists forced against the knot binding them.

  He could feel the knot giving, coming apart, and rotated his hands together, continuing the process.

  “The man was found with no papers or identification on his person,” he said through a mouth that had filled with the taste of his own blood, “just like the previous victims. Don’t you read the papers on the days you don’t blow up school buses?”

  Ben expected to be hit again, welcomed the strike for the further distraction it would provide, but what he got instead was a laugh.

  “They did not tell me you were this bold, American.”

  “People have been known to misjudge me.”

  “It would not bother you terribly if I killed you, would it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Too bad,” the leader said, and Ben heard the distinctive clack of a pistol slide being snapped backward just as his hands came free.

  Ben threw himself forward into the space where he judged the leader to be, arms thrust out before him. Impact came fast, forcing both men back toward the van’s rear doors. Ben could hear and feel the desperate shifting about him, as the rest of the Hamas soldiers scrambled to join in the struggle. They might draw their guns, but with their leader and Ben so close together, they could not even think of firing them.

  Ben managed to fasten a hand onto the wrist of the leader’s gun hand. He jerked it upward and the pistol sent a round exploding through the van, the sound ear-numbing. Then he drew the leader toward him and smashed his forehead into the man’s nose. He felt the bone give under the pressure and projected himself over the body, tearing free of the hands groping for him as the van careened around another corner. Ben never actually felt for the latch holding the rear doors closed; he simply crashed into the doors and happened to knock them open with his shoulder.

  The doors blew backward into the night and Ben tumbled out of the van. He braced himself for the fall, but impact against the road was nonetheless stunning. He hit the pavement and rolled, desperately worried about losing consciousness. He came to a stop at the side of the road, tore his hood off, and turned back to look at the van which was spinning to a halt at least a hundred yards beyond him. Men began spilling out, firing their pistols clumsily in his direction.

  Ben climbed to his feet and stumbled, the nearby mountains of Judah casting long moonlit shadows across him. Had the van reached the barren and desolate land beyond them, he would have found himself with no viable cover.

  As it was, Ben surged into some brush off the shoulder. The gunshots continued to trace his flight, none close enough to cause concern as the darkness of the trees shielded him. He was not sure how many men were in pursuit; four at least, five maybe.

  One of his ankles began to throb and stiffen, and he found himself using the overhanging branches to help pull himself on. He ducked low amid the thickest foliage, as footsteps crunched the underbrush behind him, growing louder. He crossed over the crest of a hill and lost his footing yet again, tumbling into a prickery thicket on the periphery of a sprawling grove of orange trees that shifted in the wind like a single canopy.

  Ben felt stinging pain on his arms and face where he’d been scratched. He was able to drag himself into a hollow formed by a nearby nest of bushes just as footsteps plunged down the hill in his wake. With the night serving as camouflage, the men from Hamas rushed right past his hollow for the grove of orange trees beyond.

  Ben waited until he had recovered his breath before emerging. He busied himself with trying to get his bearings; he was several miles down Jaffa Road, the main route linking Jericho to the rest of the West Bank.

  He had leaned over to retie his shoe when he heard the crack of a branch snapping in a grove just before him. Stilling even his breath, Ben realized the terrorists must have left one of their number behind on the chance that he had doubled back in an attempt to elude them. Whatever the case, this man stood between him and any chance at escape. And he couldn’t delay here much longer, not with the others from Hamas sure to return once they found they’d lost the trail.

  Ben swallowed hard and crouched lower, feeling about the ground for a branch or log. Instead, he located a rock partially buried in the ground. Extracting it took little effort. The rock felt light in his grasp, but weighed easily enough to serve his deadly purpose.

  He still couldn’t see the Hamas man poised a mere ten feet before him and had only the single crack of that branch to provide any clue to the man’s position. Ben rose into a hunched stance and crept forward, holding the rock at waist level. The night breeze ruffled some thick brush directly before him, revealing the man he sought. As he fixed his gaze, the man turned slowly and stared almost directly at him. Ben felt his heart skip a beat and prepared himself to make the desperate lunge that now seemed inevitable.

  But the terrorist swung back around heedlessly. Ben paused long enough to resteady his breath before continuing. He straightened from his haunch and drew to within arm’s distance, the man just on the other side of the thick brush. Ben brought the rock overhead and s
tarted it downward as he surged through the thicket. He knew it was happening fast, yet the whole act seemed to unfold in slow motion, every move exaggerated right up to the point he slammed the rock down on the terrorist’s skull.

  It sounded like an egg cracking, only much louder. Ben felt his own breath leave him as the Hamas man simply crumpled. He’d expected a grunt, a moan, a muffled rasp—something. But there was no sound at all until the soft thud of the body hitting the ground.

  Ben rushed up the hill, retracing his earlier steps back to the road. He determined the safest strategy to pursue at this point was to cling to the cover of the woods adjacent to that road, staying out of sight in case the terrorists widened their search for him. He had started walking back toward Jericho when a car screeched around a curve before him, its headlights catching him in the last instant before he dove into the brush.