XV
Abe Ringel
IN THE END IT WAS SHIMSHON who phoned Abe. And he and Rendi had been having such a lovely morning, too. They had risen with the sun for their early-morning jog. Afterward they bought croissants and coffee at the Hi-Rise bakery down the street. They ate in their kitchen, lounging and debating the merits of the Red Sox trading a young starting pitcher for a veteran reliever to help the team down the pennant stretch.
And then the call came through. Rendi had never seen Abe look so white-faced, nor had she known him to be so silent. He barely spoke, just grunted short, one-word responses to Shimshon. And then Rendi’s phone rang. She picked up the call because it was Dennis Savage.
“Have you heard?” His voice was tight, terse.
“I think we just did,” she responded in shock, still unsure of what had happened.
“It was a straightforward kidnapping,” Dennis continued. His words would have filled any other stepmother with dread, but all Rendi felt was an acute alertness, as if each of her senses were sharpened and suddenly stronger. Part of her was also grateful that Dennis was already involving himself. “Plenty of witnesses, Israeli police on the case. Rendi, the CIA alerted me almost immediately, so they’re on top of it.” When she didn’t respond, Dennis lowered his tone. “We’ll find her,” he said gently.
Rendi mumbled her thanks and said they’d be in touch once they landed in Israel. She left Abe sitting distraught in the kitchen while she packed two bags. By the time they got to Logan Airport, she realized that she hadn’t packed any toiletries.
In the airplane Rendi held Abe’s hand as he stared out the window. She could only imagine what he was thinking—this had been his greatest fear about Emma’s job with Pal-Watch, that something “political” would happen to her. Rendi’s own thoughts were of desperate hope. She hoped that Emma had had the good sense to keep her head down, to do whatever she was told to do. Emma, a chip off the old block, could be opinionated. Rendi hoped she could for once keep her thoughts to herself.
Abe shifted in his seat. “I should have forbidden her to go,” he said.
“You couldn’t forbid Emma anything,” Rendi replied, squeezing his hand in response. “That would only have sent her to Israel faster.”
“I should have locked her in her room,” he said emotionally.
“She’s not a child. You can’t keep her from living her life.”
“And look where it’s gotten her!” he exclaimed, to the evident annoyance of the person sitting in front of him.
“These things generally work out. We’ll get there and see.” Rendi believed what she was saying. Sometimes a hostage was just a means to an end; sometimes the abductors would hold them until their demands were met. Rendi’s instincts were honed after a lifetime in espionage. And her gut was telling her that there was a reason that Emma alone had been chosen among all Habash’s multinational employees. She was American, with a famous father. That had to have been the reason she’d been targeted.
And if Dennis already knew about the kidnapping, that meant American agencies were working toward a resolution even now. The last thing they would want would be the death of Abe Ringel’s daughter at the hands of terrorists. The play this would get in the press would whip up even more bellicose sentiment, and if there was one thing American agencies wanted to keep in check, it was that.
When they landed at Ben Gurion International Airport, Shimshon was standing at the gate, his face, drawn and tight-looking, half hidden beneath a battered Boston Celtics cap. Rendi hadn’t seen him in several years, since Abe’s last visit to Israel. Shimshon grabbed Abe by the shoulders and hugged him forcefully. He looked into his face and began to speak but became emotional. He lowered his head.
Rendi stepped in to take charge. “Has there been more news?”
Having a direct question to answer seemed to untie Shimshon’s tongue. “Nothing new. I’ll take you right to Pal-Watch. The detectives are there with Habash Ein now, going over the evidence they’d collected in the Husseini case.”
Abe asked, “Do they think there’s a connection?”
Shimshon reached for Rendi’s bag and led the two of them through the airport to the baggage claim. “They’re starting there, obviously. She’d been talking to people, different informants. They’re looking at everybody.”
“What was she doing, dealing with informants?” Abe thundered. “She should have been behind a desk!”
Shimshon shook his head. “This wouldn’t have happened if she’d been working for an Israeli firm, a nice, safe firm in Jerusalem. It’s Habash Ein’s fault. There are all sorts of questionable characters in and out of the Pal-Watch doors. Who can guess what criminals she’s met with?”
Rendi ignored Shimshon’s allegation and placed a cooling hand on Abe’s back. “She was doing her job, researching. She was doing exactly what you would.”
“But I’m a sixty-year-old man! Not a young girl alone in a foreign country!”
Rendi turned to Shimshon. “Have they heard from the kidnappers yet?”
Abe mopped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief as Shimshon shook his head in the negative.
Rendi smiled ruefully. If Emma’s abduction were related to the Husseini case, surely the people holding her would call with demands. This would mean that Emma was still alive. “We will. I’m sure of it.”
XVI
Hostage
WHEN SHE WOKE the next morning, Emma didn’t remember where she was. But it all came rushing back as soon as she opened her eyes. Kidnapped. Kidnapped and, she noticed as she peered around her room, kept in better condition than she kept herself. This was not the typical sleeping arrangement for a hostage. She thought of the footage shown on YouTube.com and other sites of abductees sitting on floors, wrapped in flags of countries not their own, looking scared and underfed and threatened, surrounded by men whose faces were covered in scarves.
But this was different. There was a breeze flowing through the window. She’d slept on a comfortable bed and then eaten a plateful of dates that had been placed on the dresser. Emma walked to the closed door. She knocked on it twice, and a man she didn’t recognize opened it. His face was pockmarked and pinched, and he was tall, skinny, and mean-looking. And he was holding a machine gun.
He pointed it at her violently, and Emma grew instantly afraid. She slammed the door shut as the man screamed in Arabic. She sat on the bed, shaking, for several moments, and then the door reopened. Emma was paralyzed with fear even when she saw Nawal’s friendly, open face. “Ready for your exercise?” Nawal asked cheerily.
Emma could barely shake her head yes or no. Nawal followed her gaze to the man with the machine gun. “Don’t worry, he won’t shoot,” she teased. Emma’s eyes filled with tears.
Nawal took a deep breath. “Sorry. Bad joke.”
She led Emma from her room through the house and outside into a large grove of trees. The man followed them silently, the gun slung behind his back.
As they wandered down a paved path, Nawal chattered on about the time she’d spent in America as a student at USC. Before that she had been educated in schools for children of American diplomats. This explained her perfect English. Emma had two friends from law school who’d gone to USC for undergrad, and soon Nawal and Emma discovered they had a common acquaintance, a radically obnoxious boy Emma had known in law school, named Elmer Jones. Nawal, too, had disliked Jones, despite his obsequious support for all things anti-Israel and anti-American. “He put the moves on me,” Nawal confided. “He thought I owed him, on account of his support for our cause. He said he’d always fantasized about deflowering a virgin. What a jerk.”
“He put the moves on me, too, even without the cause and fantasy BS,” Emma said, pleased that they had something in common. They both laughed, making her forget for just a second that this was not simply a case of two girls engaged in boy talk.
She quickly remembered that they were being followed by a man with a gun. But she was intrigued
by Nawal, who spoke of the beach, of learning to surf, of her taste for hamburgers. Her mood was easygoing and carefree. She plucked an orange from a tree, peeled and ate it, offering Emma sections as they walked. She didn’t seem politically inclined at all. And, most important to Emma, they didn’t seem all that different from each other. So what could have persuaded a young woman like this to get caught up in something as dangerous and illegal as the kidnapping of an American citizen?
After their walk, Nawal brought her back to her room. Emma used the solitude to sort through what she knew. “Adam” had given her information on TNT. Then “Mohammed” had kidnapped her. It didn’t make sense. Were these people framing the members of TNT? Were they themselves the perpetrators of the bombing at the American Colony? She didn’t think so. They seemed too educated for mass murder. The minute she thought that, she realized how snobby she was being. Remembering the 9/11 terrorists, she knew that educated people could murder just as easily as uneducated ones.
Emma stared out the window, the view transforming from gorgeous to oppressive as the hours ticked by. She walked the perimeter of her room for what seemed a thousand times. She counted the number of planks in the floor, she sang herself little songs. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and remembered that Nawal had told her she was free to visit the library. It took another hour for her to summon her courage—she knew that on the other side of her door was the gunman.
Once she was brave enough to knock, the door opened and the man looked in on her.
“Library?” She spoke timidly, pointing in its direction.
The man grunted and waved the gun to the left to show she was free to walk.
Emma took a deep breath and left her room. She wasn’t surprised when the man followed her. He kept a yard behind her at all times, even when she slowed or sped up her steps.
The library was impressive—a wide, long room, darkened by thick linen curtains hung over floor-to-ceiling windows. The sheer number of books took her breath away. Shakespeare, Milton, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway in English; Molière and Dumas in French; Márquez, Neruda, and Cervantes in Spanish. There were also rows of leather-bound books in Arabic, books that Emma held and opened and returned to the shelves with wonder.
There were also shelves and shelves of nonfiction organized by topic. There were histories, biographies, philosophy, even psychology books by Freud and Jung. Emma wandered the aisles of these books, growing more and more confused with each topic. What kind of people were these? Learned, educated, and obviously wealthy. Again, not how she would profile a band of kidnappers.
She learned something else about her captors, too. At least one of them came from family money. Some of these books were decades old, some dusty and rarely opened, some had pages that were worn and ink that had faded with time. On the inside cover of several of them was an elegant bookplate with a family crest and a name in beautiful Arabic calligraphy. She could not recognize the name, but it was clear that this was a cultured and influential family.
She walked the center aisle until she came to a set of large oak double doors, looming and ominous, with bas-relief scenes carved into twelve sets of panels. They were battle scenes, scenes of martyrs from the time of the Crusades. She recognized the wide cross of the Knights Templar and the tunics of the Muslim soldiers. Rendered in wood, these characters seemed to have color to them, life. The wood was smooth as chocolate when she ran her hand over it. Then she wondered whether the same sorts of carvings were on the other side of the door. She didn’t even think twice before turning the knob and peering around to see what was on the back side.
There was more carving, but Emma no longer cared. For coming from the other side of an open door, ahead and to the left of where she stood, was the sound of angry voices arguing above the sound of a news broadcast. She looked over her shoulder—her escort was at least fifty feet from where she stood and thumbing through a newspaper. He wasn’t even looking at her. So, without considering the consequences of what she was doing, she moved quickly through the dark hallway, heading as quietly as she could for the beckoning sounds.
As she approached, the arguing voices became louder and she recognized Adam’s—or Mohammed’s. She still had to remind herself of his real name.
She pressed her ear against the open door and kept watch behind her for the gunman, her heart pounding. She couldn’t understand every word, but the thrust of the argument was clear even to her relatively untutored ear. Thank goodness for her decision to take those two semesters of Arabic, she thought.
“—said from the beginning. It is not wise to keep her here!”
“You are bloodthirsty, Yassir.”
Emma shifted her weight so that she stood as close as possible to the door.
“He insults me, Rashid!”
Then a third voice spoke—Emma could tell that it was a new person because it came from another part of the room. “Shhh, Yassir, Mohammed means no insult. We are having a healthy debate.”
“A healthy deb—There is nothing to debate! While we are wasting time, the Mossad is probably planning to attack! Do you really think they will let us get away with this? The teams are on their way, probably, just like in the Nachshon Wachsman case when they fired indiscriminately, killing everyone.”
“Your emotions are getting the better of you.”
“If you say one more condescending thing, Mohammed, I am going to punch you.”
The third voice again intoned, plainly trying to keep peace. “There will be no violence! We stick to the plan.”
Emma held her breath, hoping against hope the third voice would reveal what “the plan” was—and that she could understand it if they did.
But the first speaker was more irate than ever. “I am telling you, we should take video of her and then kill her. We need to kill her today. This very moment, and then get away from here.”
As several other voices, new voices, sounded their support for this idea, Emma gasped and sobbed out loud.
It was a huge mistake. The door suddenly swung open, hitting her in the head and knocking her back. A large, heavyset man with a dark beard and sweaty hands grabbed her violently beneath the arms, bruising her skin as he dragged her into the room. Men brandishing guns leaped toward her. They yelled at each other in Arabic. Emma reached for the man holding her, attempting to loosen his grip on her shoulders. He screamed, “Do you see? Do you see what trouble we have brought upon ourselves? Kill her now!”
“No! Please! I’m so sorry!” she sputtered in her broken Arabic, her body suspended in the air by the man’s strong grasp. He shook her a bit, and then Mohammed lunged for him, pushing him hard. Emma fell to the floor in agony.
Suddenly she heard the third voice from before shout in command, “That is enough!” He was clearly the leader, for everybody froze. Everybody but Mohammed, who crouched near Emma, lifted her to a sitting position, brushed her hair from her face, and asked gently in accented English, “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, tears spilling down her face. Her nose was running, and she’d never been so scared in her life. As Mohammed sat there with her, Emma looked past him and for the first time noticed the interior of the dark room she’d been dragged into. There were two leather couches and several reclining chairs. Sadly, she was reminded of her father’s study. And then she actually saw her father’s face.
He was on the television in the corner, on the local news. He was in Israel. She tried to read the caption, which was in Arabic, but it sped by too quickly. She did recognize her own name printed among the writing. A small boy saw her gazing at the TV and shut it off.
There were about a dozen men in the room, all in various stages of alert, most holding guns. But there was one man who sat calmly in an overstuffed leather chair, fingers folded on his lap, eyes pensive. She raised her hands in the air, the way criminals did on cop shows. “I didn’t mean… I’m so sorry….” she said pleadingly in her limited Arabic, to this man, for he was clearly in charge.
The sound of her voice alarmed everyone all over again. Several men spoke angrily, and one pointed a gun in her face. Mohammed swatted it away from her and bitingly spit out a stream of Arabic.
She was frozen, unable to move. The gunman continued to shout what she assumed were curses, then lowered the gun.
“That’s enough, everybody,” the man in the chair intoned in Arabic. Instantly everyone fell silent and stepped away from Emma—all except for Mohammed, who helped her to her feet and handed her a small white piece of cloth.
She wiped her tears as the man in the chair snapped his fingers toward the television. The young boy who’d turned it off now turned it back on.
“Come,” he said, speaking in English and raising a beckoning hand. “Come, Emma.”
Mohammed nudged her forward; she staggered, only because she wasn’t expecting it. In truth the man’s use of English calmed her a bit.
“Relax.” The man in the chair spoke soothingly. “Yassir is sorry for hurting you, aren’t you, Yassir?” he called to the heavyset man who’d dragged her into the room.
The heavyset man cursed in both English and Arabic, his face reddening. It was only when the man in the chair turned his body toward him that he capitulated and muttered in accented English, “I’m sorry.”
Emma didn’t know what to make of this apology. “That’s all right,” she said, without conviction.
Mohammed steered her until she stood directly in front of the man in the center of the room. With a hammering heart and tears threatening to spill again, she took the man in. He had small brown eyes, a stern mouth, thick wavy hair, and a thoughtful expression. He looked nothing like the slight, teenage boy he’d been in the photo in Faisal’s file. Now Rashid Husseini was a man, filled out and weathered. Though he was youthful, there were worry lines around his eyes.
He seemed to understand all that she had learned with just a look. “You know who I am?”
She mumbled, “Yes,” immediately regretting that she had.
The Trials of Zion Page 9