by Tommy Tenney
He exhaled tensely, reached to his waist, and pulled out a large, gleaming machine pistol which seemed to fill the room with import and menace. His other hand reached over to the gun’s action and pulled it back with a ratchet sound that rang out in the quiet of the room. His eyes swept their surroundings, and for a moment, she caught a bit of the moment through his eyes—No real cover, just a bunch of delicate, priceless antiquities—hardly a great place for a shootout . . . .
“Ladies, please sit down over there,” he whispered, pointing to the corner just inside the room’s entrance. Hadassah saw his thinking—the narrow space behind the open metal door was a perfect place to take cover. She hurried over and crouched behind the thick wedge of steel, the other woman huddled behind her.
Wincing at the hardness of floor beneath her and the insult of rigid wall at her back, she was finally struck with the realization that here was the possibility of mortal danger. This excursion had never been considered high-risk and had therefore been unscheduled, executed with unmarked, inconspicuous vehicles and minimal protection. The one Shin Beth bodyguard inside, several more possibly outside. Now with an intruder possibly inside the Shrine and the bodyguard apparently bound—or worse, she thought with a shudder—only this Mossad agent stood between her and the threat.
She found she could hardly get enough air into her lungs. Her chest began to heave with deep gasps, her vision spinning with a new wave of vertigo.
Flattened against the wall on the doorway’s other side, Meyer made a single rapid lunge, reached up, and flicked the light switch. Then he looked around and grimaced. The room’s brightness level had hardly changed—clearly, overhead lighting was kept at minimum levels to protect its documents. Now the room’s main light still came from the recessed purplish glow within the displays themselves.
“Can we turn those off?” he whispered to the hostess half-obscured behind the open door. The urgency was obvious—as long as light was giving them away, especially with so many reflecting glass tables, any attacker in the darkened hallway would have a good chance of spotting their hiding places.
Her eyes now wide with terror, the museum hostess could only reply by nodding emphatically toward a bank of controls behind him, at the end of the room’s longest wall. The agent gripped his weapon harder and grimaced again—it was a spot completely exposed to the hallway.
Hadassah peeked around the corner to see if it was possible to help him. She could make an unexposed dogleg through some of the back tables to the control panel. But her lower body would still be visible and completely vulnerable under the tables’ legs. And during that split second of reaching up to flip the lights off, she would be totally out in the open.
She looked in Meyer’s direction for guidance and gulped back a scream.
A bright red laser sight-target was trembling across the wall, midway between his position and the controls. Furthermore, she could see that even though Meyer had spread himself flat against the wall, a two-foot span of mirrored glass table was about to reveal both Ari and the attacker to each other.
She held her breath. Meyer would be killed. Not only was Meyer seconds away from death, but if he went down, she and the other woman were also absolutely defenseless. The scroll—to be precise, the final span of display where all of the modern names were inscribed—was right in the target area and would be shredded in the crossfire.
Then she would be next.
She had to do it. Meyer’s earlier radio distress call would certainly bring help, but from her experience, it wouldn’t do so with the required speed.
Her peripheral vision still following the red dot, she crept out from behind the door’s shelter, down the width of several tables, then cut across the third row.
The red dot jerked and waved wildly. She must have been heard! If it dipped down below the tables, indicating that he was looking low, she knew it would be all over.
Five seconds passed. She could hear her heart thump as though a stethoscope was glued to her ears. Her skin quivered like the head of an overtightened drum. Trying to hold her out-of-control breath, she inched down the row toward the far wall and the awaiting light switch.
The red dot moved slowly down along the wall, then dipped in her direction.
She stopped and pressed herself against the floor, bracing for a bullet’s cruel smash into her body.
Another moment passed. She concentrated on calming her breath without letting any huffing sounds escape. Without even moving her head, she shifted her eyes under the table to catch a glimpse of Ari. There were his shoes, still flush against the wall, waiting like the rest of him.
Motion caught her eye—she looked up to see the dot leaving, moving back in Ari’s direction. She moved stealthily down the rest of the row. The lighting controls were only five feet away now. Five long feet of brutally dangerous space. She turned and found that she could see Ari’s face, constricted and reddened by stress. He was shaking his head no to her.
Don’t do it!
She nodded back yes—she most definitely would. Then half to make her point and half to force herself into the act, she held up one hand and three fingers.
Counting, she lowered one . . .
. . . then another, as his headshaking grew more vigorous . . .
. . . the last one, as the dot seemed to quiver, undecided, and as she lunged for the switch, the gunman seemed to guess her intention at last because the laser swerved across the wall, found the center of her back at the split second she slammed her fist into the switch, plunging the room into complete blackness, and then fell to the carpet, once more sheltered by tables . . .
. . . and Ari stepped forward, his machine pistol in a perfect modified-Weaver stance, and filled the hallway with a thunderstorm of gunfire.
Hadassah rolled, and she would never remember precisely why—whether from some awareness that she was a second away from being shot, or utter shock at the barrage from Ari, or disorientation in the sudden darkness, she would never be able to distinguish.
What followed seemed to take place in slow motion.
First came mad, deep-throated shouting, so chaotic that when it rang out, Hadassah could not tell whom it was coming from. It was Ari, of course, pulling her to her feet and yelling at her to follow him, that if she wanted to live she had to hang on and keep moving. The persistent fury of his shouts reminded her of that archetypal footage she had seen as a little girl of U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination—the way the Secret Service agents had started shouting Go! Go! Go! and not stopped their harangue until long after the president was out of view.
The now-familiar hallway streamed past her in an altered state: dark, slippery—for she almost tripped over a bleeding body on the way out—even creepy in its near-total darkness. Yet somewhere in the near-gloom of the museum stairs, she realized something amazing: she was alive. She had survived the attack and they were on their way out to safety, to open air and escape routes and freedom.
A hand gripped the back of her blouse. She turned abruptly and immediately recognized the hostess, frantic in her own right not to be left behind.
The dome room whizzed by, an exit door punched open and suddenly she was out in the cool, drafty night. Speeding SUVs with roof lights blazing were screeching into various parking angles in the lot, and dark-uniformed men rushed forward with their weapons held high.
A small clot of them surrounded her and began to pull her toward the closest vehicle. She broke free to look for Meyer, but he was nowhere among the faces swirling around her.
He had already disappeared into the night.
Chapter Fifteen
Even in her trauma and disorientation, Hadassah figured the Shin Beth wouldn’t take her far, and she was right. The SUV door had slammed shut, the engine roared ahead, and with her eyes closed, she had endured a series of jars and hard bumps as her new protectors raced her through the late-night streets of Western Jerusalem.
It was less than a minute before she felt a s
udden plunging sensation and knew down in her stomach, from memory, that they had just plummeted into the underground parking garage beneath her husband’s offices. My second trip here in a day, she noted grimly.
And then she remembered one of the early security briefings she and Jacob had endured during his first few weeks in office. In case of an attempt on one of their lives, the most secure room available lay eighty-four feet below the basement of 3 Kaplan Street. Jacob might have been rushed here on the night of her father’s murder, she realized, while she had lain in the hospital, under heavy sedation and with crowds of protectors hovering outside her door.
Her door flew open and four male hands reached in to help her step out. Trying to stand again, she realized that her head was still dizzy and her knees quite unsteady. She let the men’s shoulders bear her up and half carry her wherever they intended. They entered an open elevator, but instead of pushing a normal button to go up, one of the men whisked an electronic key card from his breast pocket and waved it at an innocuous receiver on the elevator panel. Activated by that day’s security code, the cab plunged downward. Almost thirty seconds later, the door opened onto a plushly carpeted, dimly lit vestibule.
Jacob stood there in the half-light, the expression on his face unfit for public view. He rushed forward, elbowed one of the men in the process, and grabbed her tighter than he ever had before. His chin burrowed down onto her breast and he muttered over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry . . .” while her hands reached beneath his underarms and fluttered helplessly somewhere below his shoulder blades.
They both stood there and wept while the surrounding bodyguards shifted on their feet and the elevator door beeped its slow, patient tone.
At last their tears ran out—or their sense of social embarrassment revived, she couldn’t tell which—and Jacob took her hand, pulling her toward his personal office.
The door had hardly closed before she reached for his neck and held him close again.
“Jacob, the strangest thing happened.”
He raised an upright index finger over his lips to shush her, then pulled her down onto his lap in a leather armchair.
“Honey,” she insisted, trying to sit up to look into his face, “it wasn’t just the attack. The strangest thing happened. Less than twenty seconds before everything fell apart, that Mossad agent had just gotten through suggesting that I was the target for the bombing. Me. And then, almost like it made him remember, he checked in on the radio loop, and no one was there. Like on cue.”
He sighed deeply. “Well, then, honey, you won’t believe this. I shouldn’t give this to you right now. But . . . you deserve to know.”
He reached over to the desk and lifted another manila folder, its name tab fringed in half a dozen different colors, delineating a specific security clearance.
Jacob handed it to her. She held it in midair, mentally and emotionally unprepared for the effort of reading. She knew he would summarize it for her.
“I received this only this afternoon. Your hunch, and his, may have been exactly right,” Jacob said, his voice tense. “They scoured every inch of the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure and came up dry. Then they cast the net further. Even brought in the Americans for some help with satellite reconnaissance. It turns out that two weeks before the bombing, a single infrared signature was spotted in the middle of the Jordanian desert’s most desolate plain. A keyhole satellite was tasked for a personal ID. They came up with this face.”
He reached in and held up a grainy black-and-white photo of a face that made her stiffen abruptly in her husband’s grasp.
She remembered that face, those eyes, rushing inexorably toward her on a real evening and in her every nightmare since then. She remembered those features laughing, snarling, screaming, falling backward under a wave of bodyguards.
“The face was easy to identify, even before the bombing. His name was Id-Abrahim Khazbar, and after being the Taliban’s chief executioner in Kabul for almost four years, he migrated west and became the finest terrorist organizer in Iraq. That’s where he had walked from, almost fourteen hundred miles, when he entered Jordan. Just strolled through one of the world’s harshest deserts, alone, as if it were a stroll on the beach. His latest patron group is a secret cadre of former Iraqi Baath Party elites who call themselves Death to the Exilarch.”
She frowned. That name sent a chill down to her toes, but she was too frazzled to examine why. And then the knowledge burst upon her whole. “Wait. Exilarch. Isn’t that a term from my family scrolls? A reference to the ruler of the Jews in exile? You know—the Patriarchs of Israel, their counterparts among the Diaspora, the Exilarchs—”
“Yes,” he was nodding. “It’s the honorary title given to Mordecai after the whole Esther saga was over.”
She frowned as she mentally connected the dots, almost wishing she could avoid the inevitable conclusion. “I’m not related to Mordecai but to Leah,” she said slowly, “the woman to whom Esther gave the scrolls. But some people who know about them have gotten that point confused. If they were after descendents of the Exilarch, and I’m the most high-profile person associated with his story, then . . . I was probably the one to be bombed that night.”
“It appears that way.”
He let the pause that followed wash over them slowly.
“Honey,” he said, “I’m so sorry I didn’t have better oversight over this meeting. I never would have knowingly let you go there with so little security.”
“I’m the one who cut back on the security detail at the last minute,” she replied, her voice low.
“Why?”
“Because this was an ultra low-profile, informal event at a secure location. I thought I needed some flexibility, and I was sure it wouldn’t cost me in this setting.”
“Never again,” he said quietly but with deep emotion. “You’re a target. And you’re my wife. I’m going to protect you.”
She exhaled so deeply that it seemed she had been holding her breath all evening.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked, tightening his hold around her, still seated in his lap.
“What? You mean, am I going to slip back into my depression? No. As frightening as tonight was, I feel more alive right now than I have in a long time. I have to keep going, Jacob. If this is really about me, then it’s all the more reason I have to get to the bottom of it.”
“Fine. Yes. But not on your own, and remember our agreement.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I will keep my end of the bargain.” Her promise was underscored with a tender kiss. “And by the way, I still would like more time to talk with Meyer, the Mossad agent.”
Her husband frowned and shook his head. “From the radio traffic I heard before you got here, he’s being blamed for this situation getting out of hand. I’d bet he’s on a plane back to Iraq as we speak. And he won’t be allowed within a mile of you ever again.”
“He saved my life, Jacob. It’s not fair!” She climbed off his lap and stood before him, arms crossed.
“I’m sure it isn’t, honey. But that’s life in the security forces. Anyway, he got what he wanted. And in a way, so did you.” Jacob stood and put an arm around her shoulders.
“I suppose. I just wish there was more to go with than ‘She did not perish—you must find her.’”
Chapter Sixteen
MANSOUR DISTRICT, BAGHDAD—DAWN
A hazy sun was just beginning to silhouette Baghdad’s distant rooftops and minarets, but the inhabitants of the well-kept home in the city’s upscale Mansour District were still in their beds asleep.
A rumpled red pickup came down the street and cruised slowly by the home. Four white-robed men in the extended cab stared briefly but intently at the edifice and its surrounding neighbors. Not a soul was about on the block. The Americans weren’t within a half mile. No movement from the house.
The pickup circled the block and returned.
On this pass, it stopped in front of the house and three o
f the men jumped out holding AK–47s at their midsections. The fourth hefted a missile launcher to his right shoulder. A shrill scream rang out, and the morning stillness turned into a nightmare.
First the missile whooshed into the home’s front window and set off a blast that caused the entire structure to burst apart with a roar of fire and smoke. Then the automatics kicked in, spraying the ruin with a lethal matrix of ricocheting bullets and crisscrossing dust trails.
More screams arose—whether from aroused neighbors or dying inhabitants was hard to tell. Barking dogs added to the cacophony of sounds. A robed woman appeared in a yard two houses away, waving her arms wildly.
The men jumped back in the vehicle and it raced away.
The enraged woman ran to the edge of the rubble and raised her fists to the sky.
“Why, O Allah, why!” she screamed in Arabic. “A good Shiite home! A good Iraqi family! What could they have done? What could they have possibly done?”
She turned away, her anger turned to tears as more neighbors began to emerge from their yards. An American Bradley Fighting Vehicle nudged its front bumper carefully around the far corner, its machine-gun barrel trained sideways along the street.
Not ten yards from where the neighbor stood lay the hidden answer to her anguished questions—the remnants of the home’s inner doorpost. There, along the demolished right beam of the doorframe, lay a polished, highly ornamented strip of wood. The neighbor probably would never have recognized it had she been invited in, which she never had been, for although the family was respectable, they were also highly private people. She probably would not have guessed the truth even had she noticed, curling out from its incinerated edges, a strip of paper bearing nearly illegible lines in a language she would not have recognized. To be precise, they were Hebrew passages from the Shema Yisroel, more commonly known as the book of Deuteronomy.
Together, the cryptic shards formed the remains of a discreetly mounted Mezuzah, the sign of a conservative Torah-keeping family.