Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04]

by By Jon Land

  “Don’t shoot her!” Anna ordered, her voice hoarse from the brief pressure Danielle had applied to her throat.

  Two more guards rushed in wielding flashlights. Their beams sliced through the huge room, searching for targets. Suddenly the glare of muzzle flashes erupted from the balcony of books that covered the entire far wall. The flashlights hit the floor, one shattering while the other’s stubborn beam continued to illuminate the floor.

  Anna shouted orders desperately in German and her remaining guards scrambled around the room, caught in the revolving spill of the surviving flashlight as it rolled across the floor. More silenced shots accompanied the now familiar blueish muzzle flashes. Danielle heard grunts, screams, bodies hitting the floor like axe-toppled trees.

  Seeing an opening, she started for the door.

  “No!” a male voice ordered, suddenly behind her, an amazingly powerful grip fastened around her midsection. “Reinforcements will be coming through there!”

  “Who are—-”

  “There’s no time! The window! Now!”

  The huge casement window before them overlooked the grounds and the figure charged toward it with Danielle in tow. She finally glimpsed his massive size, felt even more clearly just how strong he was.

  He fired a series of shots at the window that shattered the glass, easing their crash through it. Danielle and her rescuer hit the ground running, barely breaking stride. More glass shattered and almost immediately footsteps thumped behind them, trailed by gunfire echoing in the night.

  Danielle’s sprint barely kept her even with the man at her side. She watched him discard a pair of lightweight night-vision goggles, explaining why he had been able to aim and maneuver so adroitly inside the blackened house.

  Danielle focused on the brick wall enclosing the grounds just ahead now. Ten feet high and nearly impossible to scale, unless she could grasp one of the vines hanging off it.

  The big man heaved himself over the wall several yards ahead of her, never looking back to check on her progress. Danielle clambered after him. She grasped a vine and propelled herself upward, not stopping when she reached the top. She let herself tumble over the wall and dropped onto a thick bush that cushioned her fall. She felt a surge of exhilaration at being free of the property, as she rolled off the bush and reclaimed her feet.

  Where was the man who had saved her?

  A car screeched into reverse, seeming to appear from nowhere, braking so it stopped right before her. The passenger door swung open, as the first of the villa’s gunmen dropped over the wall to give chase.

  “Get in if you want to live!” said her rescuer.

  Danielle jumped inside. The car tore off before she had time to close the door all the way.

  She looked at the driver behind the wheel, recognizing him from a picture she had seen just minutes before.

  It was Hans Mundt.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 65

  A

  n iznak,” Ben repeated to the construction foreman at the foot of the huge steel superstructure. “Excuse me. I need to see Max Price.”

  The foreman turned away from his badge again and Ben sidestepped to stick it back in his face. “Mr. Price is an Israeli, Inspector,” the foreman said finally. “You have no authority over him.”

  “But last time I checked the city of Nablus was under Palestinian control,” Ben reminded. “And, unless you help me, you will experience the scope of my authority firsthand.”

  The foreman sneered and thrust his finger toward the top of the steel skeleton. “Mr. Price is up there. You want to see him, be my guest. Allah yisallimak,’” he added sarcastically. “May God make you safe.”

  Ben climbed into the open elevator and pressed a button on the control panel marked up. The simple platform, enclosed by rails, jerked upward and then settled into a wobbly climb up the structure’s side. When finished this would be a twelve-story Marriot Hotel and Resort. Undertaken by a consortium called Partners for Peace, it was located in the exclusive Rafiddiyah district just a few blocks from the fledgling Palestinian stock market.

  Partners for Peace was also the only target of the murdered students well known to Ben. The consortium was made up of Israeli and Palestinian businessmen and devoted to economic expansion in the West Bank. A final peace agreement, if it ever came, would lead to an incredible building boom that would make lots of people very, very rich. But a few businessmen, risk takers by nature, chose to get the jump on things and begin construction while prices on prime real estate were still low.

  With peace further off than ever these past few months, that gamble now seemed terribly ill-conceived. Construction continued sporadically, in fits and starts, often contingent on the events of the day. Ben had learned from the consortium’s headquarters that this was one of the better days and that a prime Israeli member of Partners for Peace, Max Price, was currently on-site.

  Ben held fast to the safety rail, as the car climbed the side of the exposed, steel skeleton. He felt the elevator platform jolt to a halt a few feet short of the top floor where high steel workers, wearing leather safety belts that fastened them to the structure, were busy spot-welding. A man in a hard hat and loosened tie noticed Ben and walked agilely across a makeshift catwalk no more than a yard wide toward the elevator.

  “I’m Max Price,” he announced, glaring down at Ben. “I heard you were looking for me.”

  Ben held his ID in one hand, while keeping the other locked on the platform’s nearest safety rail. “Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police, Mr. Price.”

  “You want to climb up?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “Actually,” Ben said, returning his ID to his pocket, “there’s something I can do for you. I can keep you out of jail.” Ben made sure none of the workers were in earshot before he continued. “I have information that you and your consortium were being blackmailed. I’m working on the case.”

  “What case? There is no case.”

  “That’s not what the media is going to be told when I have this project shut down.”

  “You don’t have the authority.”

  “The blackmailers were murdered. That makes all their victims potential suspects, and as such I can temporarily seize all assets.”

  Price used one booted foot to leisurely scratch his ankle. “I’m Israeli, remember?”

  “And this is Palestine. We play by our rules here.”

  “All the more reason why you should back off, Detective.”

  “It’s Inspector. And I’ll back off, once I’m sure you’re not guilty.”

  “Assuming what you say is right, we’re the victims here. We were the ones being blackmailed.”

  “You paid.”

  “Maybe we didn’t have a choice.”

  “I’m not going to ask you what the blackmailers uncovered. I’m guessing it might have something to do with the sources of your funding, something that would upset the Palestinian and Israeli authorities deeply, like maybe your Palestinian partners are just shams. That maybe this, and other projects undertaken by Partners for Peace, will benefit only Israelis.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “If it were true and became public knowledge, you’d be ruined, so of course you paid,” Ben continued, instead of responding. “Of course you had no choice.”

  Price grabbed the exposed rail of the elevator and shook it slightly. “That’s only a guess. You’ll never be able to prove it.”

  “For now.”

  “And I don’t know anything about these blackmailers being dead. We never knew who they were—we didn’t want to know. They wouldn’t tell us how they found out, and we certainly were in no position to press them. Just don’t expect me to feel sorry for the bastards.”

  “They were high school students.”

  The color drained out of Price’s face. “We paid a hundred thousand dollars to a a couple of high school students?”

  “
Four of them, actually. All dead now, killed by one of their victims.”

  “Not me. Not us.” Price leaned forward, his toes precariously close to the edge of the catwalk. “I don’t think I should be talking to you.”

  “The alternative is the Israeli authorities.”

  “You’re not working with them?”

  “Not yet. Cooperate and we can keep it that way.”

  Price edged closer and leaped gracefully down into the elevator car. It shook and wobbled, left Ben clinging to the rail for dear life.

  “You can talk to me on the way down,” Price said simply. “We hit the ground, we’re done.” He grasped the control box from the floor and activated the down mechanism. The platform started downward, leaving Ben to cling to the railing once again. “The blackmailers—these kids, according to you—knew things nobody could have known. I figured it was an inside job.”

  An inside job... Of course it was, Ben reflected, since the students had access to Partners for Peace’s most sensitive information, thanks to Shahir Falaya’s prowess with digital copying and printing machines.

  Ben shifted his weight to better balance himself. “How did you pay them?” he asked Price.

  “Electronic transfer into a bank in Zurich.”

  “You trace the account?”

  “It was closed by the time we did.”

  “They contacted you by e-mail.”

  “Five messages. We dismissed the first two. Three and four revealed them to be in possession of extremely sensitive information. Five gave us instructions how to pay.”

  “No address you were supposed to respond to?”

  Price shook his head. “Nothing that could lead us back to them. They knew what they were doing. High school students ... I just can’t believe that.”

  The exposed compartment picked up speed, rattling past each floor.

  “Look,” said Price, “I’ve told you everything I can. We even destroyed all the e-mails to make sure there were no links whatsoever to what had taken place.”

  Ben nodded. He decided Price and Partners for Peace weren’t behind the murders; the man had been too forthcoming, too shocked by Ben’s revelations. That left three other suspects and, if nothing else, at least now Ben knew the precise methodology the students had used, knowledge that would help him once he somehow gained access to the three companies in Israel.

  “You want to tell me how the kids found all this out about us?” Price asked when the elevator thumped to a halt on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry,” Ben said, opening the gate. “We just hit the ground. We’re done.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 66

  I

  know who you are,” Danielle said, as Mundt rotated his eyes between the speeding Audi’s rear-view mirror and the road ahead.

  He broke his concentration long enough to gaze across the front seat at her. “What did Anna tell you about me?”

  “That you were looking for Nazi war criminals who assumed the identities of Holocaust survivors after World War Two.”

  Mundt shook his head. “Not quite true. I’m only looking for one.”

  He screeched the car round a hairpin turn that left Danielle clutching the car’s overdoor handle.

  “Yet you still found time to rescue me,” she managed.

  “I came here to Germany to kill Anna.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop her from finding out what she was after in Israel.”

  “Anna was in Israel?”

  “She has a friend there.” Again Mundt glanced across the seat. “A former head of Mossad named Abraham Vorsky.”

  “I know Vorsky.”

  “You should: he was the one who sent Ellie to kill you.”

  “My God ...”

  “You were getting too close to the truth I had brought him,” Mundt told her.

  “About these Holocaust survivors....”

  “Once Captain Bain shared his suspicions with you, Vorsky dispatched Ellie.”

  “To kill both of us. But I ruined his plan. I survived and picked up Bain’s trail all the way to Gunthar Weiss.”

  “Which made Anna believe you were working with me.”

  “This all goes back to your father’s connection to Weiss, doesn’t it? To the fact that they served in the same labor camp.”

  “There’s actually a lot more,” Mundt said and then screeched into a right-hand turn, heading in a direction perpendicular to the main road that ran downhill away from the Bokelberg.

  “I still don’t understand why you bothered saving my life back there.”

  “Because of our fathers, Pakad Barnea. Because of our fathers.”

  The car thundered on into the night.

  * * * *

  T

  his is about Paul Hessler,” Danielle managed to say. Her breath felt bottled up in her lungs. She was so tense forcing out those few words almost left her gasping. “He killed your father and now you’re after revenge.”

  “Did Anna tell you that?”

  “No—Gunthar Weiss. In so many words.”

  “One of the Haupsturmfuehrer’s more talkative days, then.”

  “Getting anything coherent out of him was no easy task.” Danielle hesitated. “Tell me about my father.”

  “How much do you know?”

  “Assume nothing.”

  “The money?”

  “Anna... mentioned that.”

  “Did she say where it came from.”

  Danielle shook her head, then said, “No.”

  “He got it from Paul Hessler.”

  Danielle felt her heart skip a beat. “He never told me he knew Hessler, never even mentioned his name.”

  “It was a long time ago. A time old men try very hard to forget.”

  Danielle looked at Mundt with a mixture of shock and revulsion. “How do you know all this?”

  “I have spent a good part of my life investigating Paul Hessler. Scouring reports, accumulating files, both classified and otherwise.”

  “Like the one you obtained in Israel. Traded names to get.”

  “Yes.”

  “The three men you gave the old Mossad chief were killed the next day.”

  “But I was never granted access to Hessler’s entire file.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the names on the larger list I gave to Abraham Vorsky didn’t check out. He didn’t take the bait. I thought the first three would be enough to convince him.”

  “You couldn’t have anticipated his contacting Anna Krieger. She must have confirmed that the second list you provided contained the names of innocent men!”

  “No, only men we can’t be sure of.”

  “Like my father?”

  “He’s dead. You could leave it at that.”

  “No, I can’t; not any more than you can.”

  Mundt looked pleased by her response. “I was hoping you would say that. Because I need your help ... and if you want the truth about your father, you need mine too.”

  “You expect me to help you kill Paul Hessler? Revenge for killing your father before the camp was closed? I learned that much from Weiss.”

  Mundt jerked the car to the left and slammed it to a halt on the side of the road. “You learned nothing! I had hope for you, Barnea. But it turns out you’re as foolish and misguided as the rest of them.”

  “Am I? If there’s something else going on here, just tell me.”

  “It would be better if I showed you.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 67

  P

  aul Hessler had stayed much too long at the chilly castle. Past the time the workmen had left. Past the time he had anything left to remember.

  He had sat for most of his visit in the top floor of the largest of the castle’s towers upon a stone bench meticulously re-created by European masons. Paul had them flown over to help with these parts of the reconstruction, old men like himself who still remembered the ancient secrets of stonecraft. He sat on the bench stari
ng at the fireplace, which someday, he was assured, might even work again. He stared at it until his mind numbed with thoughts of all those years ago, the hell of the camp and the stranger hell that had followed it. Then he turned to the past week, a time so sad and tragic, made no sweeter by the news of the Hessler Institute’s miraculous discovery.