Land, Jon

by [Kamal

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  * * * *

  Chapter 18

  T

  he car continued on harmlessly, and Ben vowed to keep himself closer to the cover promised by the trees and brush. By the time he approached the scattered lights and buildings of Jericho, camouflaged in foliage, he had gotten his bearings. He finally arrived at his apartment just before sunrise, drenched in sweat, his limp much more pronounced.

  He lay down, exhausted, but sleep refused to come. After a long hour he abandoned the attempt and jumped into the shower instead. By then it was late enough to try phoning al-Shaer at the medical examiner’s office. When there was no answer, a fresh dose of foreboding struck him and he headed straight over.

  The door was open when he arrived and, as he drew closer, Ben saw why: it had been shattered in the area of the latch, kicked in, by the look of things. He looked up to see Doctor Bassim al-Shaer lumbering down the hall with broom in hand.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Sometime late last night. You want more specific than that you’ll have to ask the residents who slept here,” he said, cocking his stare backward toward the storage room. “Of course, there’s one less to interrogate now.”

  “Yesterday’s victim . . .”

  “Very intuitive.” Al-Shaer stopped his sweeping long enough to give Ben a closer look. “Your face hasn’t healed very well.”

  “I suffered a setback.”

  “Last night also, of course.”

  “You lifted the corpse’s fingerprints. Please tell me you did.”

  “Certainly. And whoever ransacked the place took all the cards.”

  Ben felt his whole body sag.

  “Relax, Inspector. Fortunately, our friends didn’t understand my filing system. That fingerprint card is still here.”

  Ben breathed a sigh of relief. “What about the tests I asked you to perform with knives? Without the body ...”

  “I took pictures and precise measurements of the wounds.”

  “And the oil you mentioned from the wounds on the first Jericho victim?”

  Al-Shaer shook his head with genuine regret. “Sorry. I didn’t get that far. Put the tests off on the most recent victim until today. They would be difficult even if I still had the body. Come, I’d better show you . . .”

  * * * *

  N

  ot able to distinguish which were the belongings of the corpse they were interested in, the intruders had emptied al-Shaer’s entire supply closet and left most of its contents spilled and scattered on the floor. When these personal effects had not yielded the information they sought, Ben figured they had kidnapped him in the hope that he could provide it.

  “There are still some blood and tissue samples from the wounds of yesterday’s victim I can use to see if the same type of oil was present as on the first victim I autopsied,” al-Shaer offered.

  “That’s something, anyway.”

  “And the knives,” al-Shaer reminded, newly determined thanks to the state of his office. He was taking this personally now. “As soon as I receive them . . .”

  “I have assigned an officer to that task already,” Ben said, referring to Tawil. “He will be delivering them to you late this afternoon.”

  Al-Shaer smirked, his jowls quivering. “Tell him not to forget the side of beef.”

  Ben took the fingerprint card off al-Shaer’s hands, hoping it would yield the identity of the most recent corpse.

  It was just past nine a.m. when he reached the old police building, still an hour to go before his meeting with Danielle. His head was pounding, and he dry-swallowed a pair of aspirin as he approached his office, realizing the door was open just before he saw the shadow of a man cast on the wall of the cramped, windowless room. He smelled pungent cigar smoke and noticed it drifting into the hall.

  “Excuse me?” Ben said from the doorway.

  The smoker swung away from an inspection of the wall map of the West Bank divided into colored grids according to the level of Israeli troop withdrawal. When Danielle Barnea was here yesterday, Ben had inserted pushpins denoting the locations of all al-Diib’s killings, which the smoker had seemed to be studying.

  “May I help you?” Ben continued.

  “Hope so,” the man said, dragging the cigar reluctantly from his mouth.

  At first Ben thought he was fat, but the way the man held himself made him realize his bulk was anything but. Knobs and sinewy bands of muscle were barely contained within his suit jacket. The man’s impeccable posture made his suit resemble a uniform, even though his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, partly revealing a chest shaped like a keg. He had a square face and flat jawline. His hair was brush-cut almost to the level of a standard military crew.

  “And maybe I can help you, too,” the stranger finished.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Ben said.

  “Colonel Frank Brickland,” the stranger announced, extending his hand.

  “Inspector Ben Kamal.” And Ben felt the hand swallow his in a grasp strong enough to let him know that the fate of his fingers hung in the balance.

  “I know.” Frank Brickland wedged the cigar back into his mouth. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “What exactly is it I can do for you?”

  “Help me find my son. He’s missing.”

  “You’ve come a long way to file the report.”

  “Because he may have been here, or was. That body you discovered yesterday, I think it was him.”

  * * * *

  T

  he twomen movedoutside andsat downatop abackless stonebench in the shade facing the square, Brickland doing so as precisely as he seemed to do everything.

  “My friends call me Brick. Some of my enemies, too. They call you Ben around here, I’m told.”

  “I find my friends and enemies very hard to tell apart these days, Colonel.”

  Brickland rested his hands on his knees. “Not just here. And it’s only ‘mister’ now.”

  “Not from where I sit.”

  “Yeah, like they say, you can take the man out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the man. I’m six months retired out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the good ole U.S. of A. Fifth Special Forces Group. A victim of cutbacks and consolidation. Two of our groups are being deactivated. I went because I raised a stink.”

  “Giving you time to travel to all the world’s most popular vacation spots.”

  “I told you what brought me to this shithole, and a couple hours in-country’s all I need to question any man’s sanity who stays when he’s got a choice.”

  “Who said I had a choice?”

  “Who said I was talking about you? Maybe you’re not the only one who got totally fucked for doing his job.”

  “Something you can relate to.”

  “Damn straight. So let’s keep this one American to another, short and sweet. I’m here because the specs on that body you turned up yesterday match my kid’s.”

  “Just how did you come by the report detailing them?”

  “Shit, hoss, information’s a commodity like anything else. You know where to buy, it’s there for you to purchase. Store’s always open. Clerks are eager to do business. And the market’s networked. I let the right people know what I was looking for, what to watch out for. I got a call last night.”

  Doctor al-Shaer had only filed his report late yesterday, Kamal calculated. Stiff as he looked, Colonel Frank Brickland moved like lightning.

  “Obviously,” Ben said, “you did not come from the States after you got that call.”

  “Nope. I was in Cairo by way of Beirut and Amman. Tripoli was going to be next on my list.”

  “Visiting all the Mideast tourist traps, I see.”

  Brickland’s expression turned into something between a smile and a smirk. “Yeah, all those places where you’re apt to find bullets instead of beaches.”

  “What makes you think your son was the man we found murdered yesterday?”

&
nbsp; “Tough being a father, you know,” Brickland said. “Almost as tough as being a son when your father’s a major asshole like me. My kid ain’t smart enough to realize that, so he wants to follow in Dad’s footsteps. Special Forces Group Five, a goddamn fucking legacy. Desert Storm instead of Nam. Hey, the bastard got to win anyway! Spent the whole war zeroing mobile scud launchers and assorted other installations.”

  “Zeroing?”

  “It goes like this, hoss. All that high-tech hardware we got cruising the skies is useless until someone tells them where to aim at. In Desert Storm, SF troops had laser sights rigged straight into the missiles’ targeting systems. Point, signal, aim, shoot. End of fucking story.”

  “Different than your role in Vietnam, I suppose.”

  “In a big way. Everything there was up-close and personal. We carried a killing knife instead of a laser beam, and the only thing we sighted was the next Gook commander in our cross hairs. That was the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Daddy’s footsteps, remember? Kid didn’t get to fill them all. Yeah, he got enough of a taste of the up-close personal stuff over there to want a full helping. Too quiet these last few years, though, to fill his plate.”

  “You’re saying he came here?”

  “Walked away from the SF when it was time to re-up and signed on with the Israeli Defense Force. Easy logistics since my ex-wife is Jewish. They welcomed him with open arms, gave him a chance to practice the up-close and personal stuff in the countries I been trailing him through.” Colonel Frank Brickland’s eyes seemed to tear up, however briefly. “Yeah, he ended up in the old man’s footsteps, let me tell you, maybe a size or two bigger. Then he disappeared.”

  “Israelis can’t help you?”

  “Information commodity doesn’t trade as freely over there. I dug around and found out what I could, hit a stone wall going back maybe three months. Nobody knows shit from that point, or the people that do ain’t talking.”

  Ben considered the prospects. “Which brings us to the body found yesterday morning.”

  “Think about it, hoss. He goes undercover. Maybe he’s on to something, something big. And somebody snuffs him to keep it in the family.”

  “We are proceeding on the premise that the body we discovered yesterday was the victim of a serial killer responsible for several other murders in the West Bank.”

  Brickland frowned. Even his cheeks looked muscled. “Yeah, the Wolf. I read that in the report, noticed your pushpins on the wall too.”

  “The report didn’t impress you, obviously.”

  “As a cover; killer of my kid creating an alibi for himself.”

  “You don’t find that farfetched?”

  Brickland stood up and turned away. He rested his hands on his hips and took a deep breath. Ben could see the muscles rippling beneath his shirt. Brickland turned around slowly, a frighteningly calm look drawn over his face.

  “You never served, Benny, but you’re living in a fucking war zone now, and you volunteered for it. You got yourself stuck deep in enemy territory and you’re still holding the fort even after everybody and his brother has you zeroed. You got any idea why you’re still alive?”

  “My father was a hero. Some say they let me live out of respect.”

  “Respect’s got nothing to do with it. It’s fear. You’re alive ‘cause they’re scared of you, scared of what you’ll do to them if they fuck up. That’s what holds people back: fear of what happens if they don’t get it right. You showed ‘em what you’re made of when you arrested three of your own, and they want no part of you. I’d take that as a compliment.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Thing is, even though you never been one, I got to figure you know what it’s like to be a soldier, so I want you to consider something. The average soldier compared to someone in Special-Ops is like comparing a school kid to a college graduate. That’s what my son was and that’s the kind of people he got himself mixed up with in Israel, if I’m reading this right. And people like you, no offense intended, can’t even imagine how these kind of people operate. What they know, how they manipulate others with that knowledge. It’s not so much that they follow a plan that makes them different, Benny, it’s that they’ve got one.”

  “Assuming all this could be true—”

  “You damn well better assume that!”

  “—then what exactly do you want from me?”

  “If that turns out to be my son you found yesterday, you’re way out of your league. That being the case, you want to stay alive you better have somebody who knows how to play at this level right alongside. You keep me briefed on your investigation and I’ll watch your back. We can start with a visit to the medical examiner’s office. Let me take a look at the body.”

  “We’ve got a problem there.”

  * * * *

  B

  en wasvague aboutthe kidnappingand hisescape thenight before, only slightly more specific when it came to the condition in which he had found al-Shaer’s office earlier that morning.

  “Shitty day you had yesterday,” Brickland noted stoically when he had finished. “Beat up, tortured, stoned, and shot at. What are you going to do today?”

  “Ask questions. Hope the answers lead somewhere.”

  “You got those fingerprints back in your office?”

  “I was just about to send them along through the proper channels.”

  “Be nice if you could make a copy beforehand.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “I’d like to know if that body was my son’s, soldier.”

  “And if the prints don’t match his?”

  Brickland looked at him harshly. “You’re telling me this guy wasn’t a native, maybe even came from the States like us. What do you think the chances of your ‘channels’ getting his prints run through Washington or Interpol anytime soon?”

  “Not very good.”

  “So give me a shot. What do you have to lose?”

  “Did your son ever have his appendix out?”

  “No, it was his gallbladder. I sent him a card from wherever the fuck I was at the time.” He tilted his head with a cocky sneer. “Nice try, though.”

  Ben stood up noncommittally, realizing Brickland was actually an inch or two shorter than he; it just seemed as though he should be taller.

  “Give me some time to think about it,” he told Brickland.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Ben watched him start to move away. “You’re a long way from home, Colonel.”

  “We both are, Benny.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 19

  B

  encalled Zaid Jabral, editor of the Al-Quds newspaper, as soon as he returned to his office.

  “Ready to take me up on my offer to make amends?” Jabral said from Jerusalem, sounding as though he was glad to hear from Ben.

  “Perhaps I only wanted to see if it was genuine.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I need some information on a man, an American . . .”

  Ben described to Jabral his brief encounter with Frank Brickland. Jabral promised to see what he could do, suggested Ben call him back later in the day.

  No sooner had he hung up the phone than Danielle Barnea was escorted into his office at precisely ten o’clock. He rose as she came through the door.

  “I trust you’re ready to get started,” she said, no greetings exchanged. “I reviewed the files again last night. Some questions arose. I’d like to see the body.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “You can’t. It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Someone stole it last night.”

  “Another mystery?”

  “Not really: Hamas.”

  “And how can you be so sure?”

  “Because they kidnapped me when the body didn’t yield the answers they wanted.”