by By Jon Land
She reached the front wall and studied the bank of light switches briefly before lurching upward and drawing all of them down at once in a single swipe. The greenhouse was plunged instantly into darkness, evening the odds somewhat. The gunmen had no choice but to come inside now, into the darkness where their superior numbers could be more easily dealt with.
Danielle retrained her grip on the spade to make sure it was ready to use as a weapon, then moved to the greenhouse’s far back corner where the little light shining in from the house was least available. More glass shattered, as a pair of gunmen hurdled through the already weakened windows, spraying the room with gunfire that flashed through the thickening fog. The door banged open, and Danielle thought she recognized another two sets of footsteps barging their way inside.
Four men in total, then. Just what she had suspected.
Stay under the table, Danielle thought, as if Corstairs might hear her.
She stood motionless in the corner, waiting for the separation she needed to launch her first strike. Her heart thudded with practiced anticipation, not fear. Ten months without any action and now twice in the same week. Doing what she did best, what she had been trained to do for so long.
Danielle saw one of the gunmen heading toward her, turning slowly from one side to the other as he made his sweep. That meant his eyes were poised her way barely a third of the time; ample opportunity for her to choose her moment to pounce.
In the end, instinct dictated her move. She sprang because something inside, like an internal clock, told her it was time. She caught the man at a moment when he was turned all the way around, facing the opposite direction. Danielle felt herself grabbing his hair and jerking his head back as she raked the prongs of the spade across his throat. There was little sensation after that. Just a splash of warmth and the coppery stench of blood as it gushed from his wound. Danielle had stripped the submachine gun from his grasp before he touched the floor.
Three attackers left, all separated in the same darkness that was now hers to blend into. She crouched low and tried to pick out any of the remaining gunmen amidst the indistinct shapes lost to the thickening fog and endless rows of multicolored roses.
Danielle ducked still lower and tried to spot her targets under the planting tables. But the meager light spilling in from the main house didn’t reach the floor.
“Over here,” a hushed voice called across the greenhouse. “I think I heard something.”
The speaker must have been closing on Charlie Corstairs’s position. Danielle heard a brief clatter of footsteps, followed by another. Then she angled her submachine gun slightly upward, aiming for a still-whole portion of the greenhouse’s windows, and squeezed off a rapid burst.
The submachine gun jumped in her hands, the percussion of the shots stinging her ears and drowning out the sound of more glass shattering. A pair of shapes in the greenhouse’s center spun toward the sound and opened fire.
Danielle studied their muzzle flashes, programming the positions into a part of her brain that acted on such things subconsciously. She rose to an upright position and fired twin, evenly spaced bursts at the spots where the gunfire had flared. One man screamed and took a section of potted roses with him to the floor. The other was punched backward into a support beam from which he slowly slumped down.
Danielle heard the final man’s footsteps pounding across the floor. He was almost to the door when she locked him in her sights, aiming low for the legs to make sure she took at least one of them alive. Pulled the trigger.
Click.
She tossed the empty submachine gun aside and leaped up on the nearest table, feeling her shoe sink into freshly watered soil before she leaped to the next. Four tables later, she dropped to the floor with her gaze locked on the final man fleeing into the night. Almost to the door, she heard a gasping sound and swung to find Charlie Corstairs kneeling on the floor clutching his chest, face pale white against the churning fog.
He was having a heart attack.
Danielle rushed to him, left the final man to the night. She eased Corstairs down to a lying position atop a bed of shattered glass, soil, and the remnants of roses, and cradled his head in her lap to keep it elevated.
“Breathe easy, Charlie. You’re going to be all right.”
Suddenly he began gasping for breath, his hands flailing through the air as if for something to grasp. One of them struck Danielle in the cheek as she maneuvered to lie his body out flat. Then his hands stiffened and flopped to his sides, the old man’s eyes locked open.
Danielle tilted Corstairs’s head backward and tried CPR, alternating her breathing with chest compressions. Minutes passed, how many she couldn’t say before she sat down next to the body, breathless and exhausted.
Danielle tried a few more minutes of CPR before finally giving up and exiting the greenhouse, as the distant wail of sirens fluttered through the night air.
* * * *
Chapter 29
W
hat’s going on?” Ben asked al-Asi, as they neared a military blockade erected before the entrance of an Israeli settlement. The colonel half-smiled. “That’s right. You’ve been away from our country for a while. You are witnessing an eviction, Inspector.”
“By Israelis?”
Al-Asi nodded. “Of another outpost manned by what we’ve come to call the Hilltop Youth. The brainchild of one Sammy Barr. Ever heard of him?”
“No.”
“Call him a fabulously wealthy rogue settler. Famous for buying land from Palestinians in the occupied territories to create more settlements. Infamous for planting bombs in the cars of Arab mayors and plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock.”
Ben could see some sort of ruckus going on just short of the top of the hill. Israeli soldiers, it looked like, dragging and carrying teenage boys and girls toward a waiting bus.
“What does he have to do with all this, Colonel?”
“A few years ago, one of Barr’s grandsons was shot and killed. While the family was mourning him, a few of the boy’s friends set up camp with tents and sleeping bags on a hill facing Barr’s estate on the other side of Nablus. That was the beginning of the Hilltop Youth. Thanks to Sammy Barr’s financial support in the years since, over seventy of these small encampments have been built illegally, manned almost entirely by radical Israeli youths. The Israeli government has finally become more proactive in dismantling them. But every time one outpost gets taken down, another rises up, usually erected by those just evicted.”
Ben watched more children being herded forcefully onto the bus. “So their incarceration doesn’t last very long.”
“They receive a slap on the wrist and are told to never do it again. Make no mistake about it, Inspector, these are dangerous children; not so much for what they are as for what they’re going to grow up to be. They represent the first generation of Israelis to be born on the settlements. They feel their right to this land transcends everything else and they are not of a mind to compromise.”
Ben gazed again at the Israeli boys and girls swiping at soldiers with their fists and imagined them grown up, in a position to wield power. He looked back toward al-Asi and could tell from the colonel’s grim expression that he had been thinking the same thing.
“Do you trust Kishek?” Ben asked, stopping his U.N. vehicle well short of the Israeli blockade.
“He is a man with something to gain, Inspector. Often that is the best reason to trust anyone.”
Ben and al-Asi approached the roadblock with arms extended before them and identifications held open in their hands. The soldiers seemed to be regarding them casually until one of them, a captain, emerged from behind the cover of a tank with his palm extended into the air.
“That’s far enough,” he ordered.
He approached and checked Ben’s ID, then al-Asi’s, letting his stare linger for a longer time on the colonel.
“What’s going on here has nothing to do with the United Nations,” the captain finally said to Ben.
“We’re here on another matter.”
“You mean you are,” the captain shot back. He pointed toward al-Asi. “He’s not. He has no authority here. In fact, I don’t see a travel pass stapled to his papers.”
“This man is minister of the interior for the Palestinian Authority.”
The captain smiled. “Then he’s out of his territory, isn’t he?”
“I’d like to question the leaders of this outpost.”
“Pardon me?”
“Farm. They call it a farm. Meitza Farm, after one of their friends who was shot to death while taking a walk.”
“You’d rather leave them in place, wouldn’t you, Captain?”
The officer shrugged. “I don’t know. The more we evict them, the madder they get, so you tell me. In any case, they’re now in Israeli custody. You’ll have to wait until they’re processed to file a request for an interview.”
“Do you know why I’m here, Captain?”
“Can’t say that I care.”
“I’m investigating the massacre in Bureij. As you’ll note in my. . . papers, the Israeli government has granted me the authority to interview anyone I see fit when I see fit.” Ben hardened his stare, hoping it added to the substance of his bluff. “I’d like to interview the leaders of this farm, Captain, and I’d like to interview them now.”
* * * *
Chapter 30
A
pair of soldiers drove Ben up the last stretch of hillside in a jeep open to the descending night. The wind was crisp and cool and he longed for the jacket he had left in the U.N. vehicle back at the blockade where Colonel al-Asi was being held until he returned.
Drawing closer to the outpost, Meitza Farm, he saw a pair of ramshackle tireless trailers plopped down on the ground not far from what looked like a rusted trash Dumpster, fitted with makeshift roof and window cutouts so it might serve as living quarters. As he watched, another pair of boys were dragged out of the Dumpster, the second grasping the jagged cutout of a doorjamb for effect more than anything.
The youth of Meitza Farm looked more like American hippies than young religious zealots. They had wound their drooping side curls into what passed for dreadlocks and their brightly colored knitted yarmulkes looked like the shapeless caps worn by urban youth back in the U.S. Their baggy pants billowed in the breeze and their bare feet, kicked free of sandals in their struggling, were brown with dirt and grime.
One of the soldiers who had escorted him to the hilltop moved to talk with the officer orchestrating the eviction, while the other stayed back, staring caustically at Ben the whole time.
“You may speak with the leaders,” the soldier explained when he returned, “only if they wish to speak with you.”
“Tell them I’m Palestinian,” Ben suggested. “They won’t be able to resist.”
He was right, of course, but given only five minutes for his interview. The boys’ names were Moshe, Ari, and Gilad. All rail thin, their pants riding very low on their hips. Moshe wore glasses. Ari had on a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some American hard rock band. Gilad had clubbed his hair back into a ponytail, leaving only the side curls dangling free. They were sequestered inside one of the dilapidated trailers, an Israeli soldier posted just outside the open doorway. The trailer smelled of must and mold, but was reasonably clean, which made Ben realize he had not seen a single speck of garbage outside.
So the Israelis hauled away trash from this isolated hilltop encampment, while down below amidst the flickering night-lights of the city of Nablus, no garbage had been picked up in months.
“You have a cigarette?” Moshe, the bespectacled one, asked him.
“I don’t smoke.”
“All Palestinians smoke.”
“When they’re not fucking,” Ari said, and plucked an acoustic guitar from its stand against the wall. He strummed a few wild notes. “Making more Arab babies they can’t feed.”
“Yeah,” echoed the ponytailed Gilad who, Ben noticed, had a black eye.
“Where’d you get that?” Ben asked him, pointing to the bruise.
“Another Palestinian punched me in the olive grove. I punched him back harder.”
Ari hit a harsh riff on the guitar to enunciate his friend’s point.
“Some members of Meitza Farm were seen in Nablus,” Ben told them, lowering his voice, “buying vehicles painted to look like Israeli military issue. I’d like to know who they are.”
Ari stopped strumming the guitar.
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” claimed Gilad, toying with his side curls.
“I think you do. In fact, I think you were the ones who arranged to obtain the vehicles, vehicles that were used by men impersonating Israeli soldiers when they massacred thirty-four innocent people in the Palestinian village of Bureij. I’m willing to overlook your part in this, but only on the condition you tell me where I can find the men you’re working with.”
“We can’t tell you what we don’t know,” Moshe told him.
“You’re being used,” Ben said.
“You’re full of shit.”
“Listen to me, whoever’s behind this can’t afford to let you live,” Ben said, rotating his gaze between the three of them. “You know too much. Your only chance is to help me find them before they come after you.”
“You think we’re scared? You think we’re scared of anyone?”
“You would be if you were smart.”
“Jews aren’t cowards like Arabs.”
“Being afraid to die doesn’t make you a coward.”
“What makes you a coward?” pestered Gilad.
“Is Sammy Barr involved in this?” Ben asked them.
The three boys exchanged glances, smiling.
“Who?” one of them asked snidely.
“Never heard of him,” another followed.
Ben climbed to his feet. “I guess I’ll have to ask him for myself.”
* * * *
Chapter 31
J
ake Fleming woke up with a start, figuring it must all have been a dream. But he found himself seated in a stiff chair in a room he didn’t recognize. His head throbbed. His mouth felt pasty and dry. He massaged his neck, realized he must have been lying with his face on the Formica table in front of him because his right cheek was asleep. He swept the long sandy brown hair, now gnarled and tangled, from his face, held it briefly behind him, and then shook it over his shoulders again.
The door to the room opened and a man wearing a suit entered. But the suit didn’t fit right, as if the guy had lost lots of weight since he’d first bought it. There were bags under the guy’s eyes and frown creases worn into his cheeks. He sat down and opened up a folder he must have had tucked under his arm.
“My name’s Fisher, Jake. Can I call you Jake?”
“What am I supposed to call you?”
“Del.”
“Del?”
“Short for Delbert.”
“You’re the one who drove me here,” Jake said, the foggy parts of his mind starting to clear.
“That’s right.”
“So where’s here?”
“Office of Homeland Security.”
“We in Washington?”
Fisher shook his head. “Not exactly. We maintain a dozen regional offices.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Nobody has. The idea is to spread them out through the country to assure the fastest, most secure response. Right now you’re at the Sector Three facility just outside of Nashua, New Hampshire.”
“Not exactly a hotbed for terrorist activity.”
“That’s the point.”
“What?”
“You go to Brown, Jake. Why don’t you tell me?”
Jake let go of his smugness. “Okay. You’d want to keep your regional facilities away from the most likely targets, including large centers of population.” He twisted to better face Delbert Fisher. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t smoke. I do,
but I don’t deal, and last time I checked I wasn’t much of a threat to homeland security.”
“What’s your major at Brown?”
“Computer science, but I haven’t declared yet. You don’t have to until you’re a junior.” The boy’s eyes widened. “Hey, is this about that hack into the FBI mainframe I pulled? That was a joke, man. I already apologized to the school and—”
“Are you familiar with al-Qaeda, Jake?”