by By Jon Land
Max Pearlman slid his chair away from her now. For a moment Danielle didn’t think he was going to speak again, and let her eyes wander the cluttered promenade in search of the man who looked so much like Ben Kamal.
“Then let me tell you,” Pearlman said suddenly. “After we established our state, during the war with the Arabs, the Haganah left the underground and became full-fledged soldiers. Some of the towns we were forced to take were filled with Arabs that Jews had always gotten along with, who bore us no ill will. We took their homes from them, Pakad. Sometimes we burned their homes after they fled. Hyram Levy cried over it, actually cried. He told me we had made refugees out of them now. We had turned them into ourselves. The hate we saw in their eyes for us, Hyram said, was the same that had once been in our eyes for the British. Ironic that we had so fast forgotten what it felt like, isn’t it? I don’t think his heart was ever in the war again after that day. Even after we won I don’t remember ever seeing him celebrate.”
Danielle was about to ask another question, when she again spotted the man who looked like Ben Kamal. She watched him dart through the crowd and launch himself toward an Israeli soldier who had stopped for a cigarette.
* * * *
CHAPTER 12
B
en had considered all his options, reduced them finally to this desperate one.
He had spent nearly a half hour since arriving at Atarim Square walking up and down the crowded artery centered between two rows of shops and cafés, searching for the Hamas bomber. He concentrated on furtive movements, any anomaly that would give the bomber away. And when that failed he began to focus on people’s eyes in search of a look of fanatical resolve swimming in them, mixing with terror as the final moment grew near.
Ben checked his watch. It was 12:56. According to Nazir Jalabad he had only four minutes left to find the bomber.
He was running out of time, goddamn it!
Ben felt himself growing desperate, realizing that if he failed he would very likely end up among the bomber’s casualties: a promenade full of lunching Israelis and one Palestinian—he wondered what the press would make of that. There seemed to be no choice other than to evacuate the square, risk the panic that would ensue. The bomber could still detonate his explosives, if he was here, but at the loss of significantly fewer lives.
Ben started toward an Israeli soldier, intending to enlist his aid.
Wait! The soldier was wearinga backpack, the only one in the square to have anything but a Galil machine gun slung from his shoulder. And this soldier had no rifle, only a side arm.
My God, maybe that’s him!
Ben looked at his watch just as the time ticked to 12:58. He had no gun, having left his pistol back in Jericho since his pass into Israel did not include permission to bring it. He knew instantly what he had to do, never even considered the consequences once the other soldiers saw him attacking one of their apparent fellows.
He started toward the soldier wearing the backpack, suddenly racked by doubt. What if the real bomber was someone else, somewhere else? Could he even be sure Nazir Jalabad had been telling the truth?
Ben quickened his pace through the crowd, approaching on an angle that would keep him on the soldier’s blind side until he struck. Just before he made his move, he spotted the wire strung around from the backpack, saw the pen-sized detonator clutched in the Hamas terrorist’s fist.
All doubt vanished.
Ben lunged.
Impact jolted his insides. He felt his ribs give a little, but maintained the sense of mind to go for the hand holding the detonator while he took the man down. He failed to wrench it completely free but managed to close his fingers over enough of the detonator to keep the suicide bomber from triggering the explosives.
They hit the polished stone of the promenade together with Ben on top, working a knee hard into the man’s groin to further weaken his grasp. Around him people lurched away in all directions. A few screamed. For Ben, the moment was suspended in time. He struggled with the thrashing soldier, yelling,
“He’s got . . .
* * * *
A
bomb!...”
Danielle lurched up from the table. Her chair crashed backward at the same time Max Pearlman’s bodyguard hurled his body atop the old man and spilled the table over for cover.
It was Ben Kamal! It really was!
But what the hell was he doing? Why was he yelling about a bomb as he struggled with an Israeli soldier he had just attacked?
Soldiers and plainclothes officers converged on Ben from all angles in the promenade, rifles or pistols raised and ready. They screamed at bystanders to clear the way and shoved the ones who didn’t listen brutally aside. Danielle whipped out her National Police badge and held it before her as she stormed forward.
“Police! Police! Hold your positions! Nobody fire!”
The authority in her voice made the soldiers obey for the moment. She didn’t know how long it would last, but she had to make it last long enough to sort all this out.
Halfway to Ben her eyes strayed to a young blind man standing utterly still beside his guide dog. Her stare lingered long enough for the man to look away.
Blind men don’t look away. . . .
The soldier beneath Ben lay still on the promenade. Ben rolled off him, one of his hands thrusting a portable detonator toward anyone who could see.
“Check his pack! Check his pack! He’s got a bomb!”
Danielle drew her gun and sprinted toward the blind man, the second bomber in keeping with Hamas procedure, who was standing stock-still in the midst of the horde of patrons evacuating Atarim Square. But the explosives, where were his explosives?
She noticed the saddlelike bags strapped to his dog’s shoulders and shuddered. He must have been waiting for maximum effect, the most people possible gathered around him before he blew himself up. Using the fleeing throngs for cover, she watched the bomber’s hand let go of the dog’s guide lead and move toward his pocket.
Danielle raised her pistol. A shot aimed at the bomber would have to be perfect—unlikely from this angle, with so many people in the way. So she steadied her gun lower, angled it so the bullet would come up just short of the dog.
This had to work!
Danielle fired through the slightest of gaps in the crowd, and the bullet ricocheted off the pavement a foot from the dog’s hindquarters. Startled, the animal sprinted away.
Yes! she thought. Yes!
The blind man tore off his sunglasses and tried to move but was caught off guard by the surge of the crowd, jostled one way and then another, as the dog reached a winding staircase leading to the street.
Danielle bolted toward the second bomber on foot, taking the most direct route over tables set in a neat row at the edge of the promenade, leaping from one to another. Plates and glasses crashed to the ground beneath her rush, until she finally gained a clear shot and fired.
The bomber reeled backward, looking as though he’d been kicked hard in the gut. His legs wobbled. His hands clutched for his chest.
Danielle noticed one of them closing around something dark.
The explosion was deafening, the force of it enough to spill her from the last tabletop she had mounted. She heard the familiar screech of brakes from the pavement, followed by the crunching thud of cars slamming into each other. But the screams of agony and terror she knew all too well from similar incidents did not come, just a few voices wailing in fear and the rising scent of burning metal that formed the blast’s aftermath.
Danielle climbed back to her feet and saw a tangle of twisted, smoking steel in the middle of the street. People were being helped from the burned husks of cars, some bleeding, but all, it appeared, alive.
She swung back toward Ben, who was being handcuffed and manhandled even as he fought to explain who he was.
“I’m in charge here! I’m in charge!” Danielle announced, rushing toward the tight grouping of soldiers who had engulfed him. She kept flashing her
badge. “National Police! National Police! This man is one of ours!”
“But, Detective, this man is-—”
“Shut up and take those cuffs off him! Do you hear me? Take those cuffs off him and back off!”
Danielle’s tone left no room for argument. The soldiers around Ben did as they were told. The rest dragged the surviving terrorist off into custody. His backpack had been stripped off. It lay on the pavement, where it was enclosed by a trio of soldiers who kept their backs to it to keep everyone else clear of its contents.
Ben rose slowly and cautiously onto his knees beneath Danielle’s protective stance. She scanned the square again, searching for the canopied table at which she had been seated just a few minutes before.
Max Pearlman was gone.
* * * *
CHAPTER 13
S
o, what bring you to Israel?”
Seated in the back of the unmarked Israeli National Police car, Ben smiled at Danielle’s question. It hurt to turn toward her. He could feel his back and shoulders starting to stiffen up from the pummeling he’d received from the soldiers back in the square above. Technically, he was under arrest. The whole situation needed to be sorted out. He would be questioned as to the source of his information, but Danielle had already assured him that she would not leave his side during the brief interrogation. Besides, Ben’s face was not unknown inside Israel. Once the authorities realized who he was, he trusted, things would go smoothly. It was the first time he had actually welcomed the celebrity status that had made him more a pariah in the West Bank than anything else.
“It seems,” Ben said to Danielle, “that fate is about to make us heroes again.”
“I can see the headlines now,” she said, nodding. “ ‘Palestinian and Israeli cops thwart suicide bombing in square. Dozens saved.’ “ Danielle’s gaze sharpened. “How did you know an attack was coming?”
“A source in Jericho.”
“And you decided to handle it yourself?”
“I had no choice, believe me,” Ben told her, and proceeded to explain.
Danielle was smiling when he finished. “It’s a good thing I left the hospital early. If you had used that pass when you planned to . . .”
“I’m still sorry I didn’t.”
“How did you find out?”
“About today?”
“About me. Was it your friend Major al-Asi from the Preventive Security Service?”
“He’s a colonel now. He was kind enough to keep me informed.”
Danielle tried to smile again, but failed.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out for the two of you,” Ben said, trying to sound like he meant it.
“Are you more sorry it didn’t work out for us?”
“You know I am. If you had any idea how much I missed you ...”
Their eyes met, and for that moment everything was as it had been two years ago, when the latest phase of the peace process they had preserved had been greeted by both sides with optimism and celebration. For the Palestinians, the road to an autonomous state seemed clearly paved. For the Israelis, the end of terror seemed a very real possibility. But the illusions didn’t hold.
Hamas terrorists enacted a desperate, all-out campaign of suicide bombings and random attacks that sent the peace process reeling. The great hope of peace became the great He, with accusations and recriminations launched by both sides. And Danielle and Ben found themselves trapped within that lie, held hostage by it while they tried to foster a relationship handicapped by geography and strained by politics.
With the West Bank and Gaza sealed for all but officials of the Palestinian Authority and its elected representatives, Ben could no longer enter any part of Israel without one of Colonel al-Asi’s special passes. For a time he was not even supposed to leave Jericho, and he had been detained by roving Israeli patrols the two times he had tried to leave the district. The few occasions he and Danielle were able to see each other were uneasy at best. From the start they had expected the need to weather that storm, but they had misjudged its intensity. As the tension between their peoples escalated, they lost favor with their respective coworkers and faced being ostracized for carrying on a relationship that washaram, forbidden by both sides.
Danielle suggested they let things cool for a while, and although Ben didn’t disagree with her, he knew the process, once started, would be difficult to reverse. Especially when the tensions between their peoples continued to escalate to the point of nearly nullifying the original Oslo agreement and threatening a return of theintifada.
Ben recalled following the most recent Israeli special elections for purely selfish reasons, rooting for Ari Bar-Rosen and his promises of renewed peace efforts out of hope it could renew his relationship with Danielle. But then he learned she was pregnant and counted the months backward a hundred times before conceding that the baby could not be his. After losing his family back in Detroit, he never thought he’d have any desire to have children again. Finding out that Danielle was pregnant with someone else’s child, though, pitched him into a deep depression from which he had not yet fully emerged. He felt he had lost an opportunity he hadn’t realized he wanted until someone else had seized it. Would she have come to live in America with him if he had asked her? He would never know. Too stubborn. Not only because he hadn’t asked, but also because a part of him still clung to Palestine, even though what he was looking for, he realized, wasn’t here.
Danielle was what he was looking for. A second chance at life, not a career or just a home. Now he had squandered that chance, and more than anything that was why he was on the verge of returning to America. He had come “home” because he had nothing left in America, then found he had even less here. He would always be an outsider, a foreigner in spite of the fact he’d been born on the West Bank. In his four years back, Danielle— an Israeli—had been the only person who had accepted him. And without her there seemed no reason to stay.
Ben wanted to reach out and take her in his arms right there in the car, started to tremble just thinking about it.
“There’s something I need,” he said to distract himself. “A tape.”
“A tape?”
“A surveillance tape of a former Hamas operative. Made in Jericho five nights ago.”
“Mossad?”
“Or Shin Bet. A white van was parked in clear view of the ex-operative’s home. It stayed only long enough to record him on tape.”
“Is this operative important to you?”
“Not at all. I think your people may have caught something else on that tape inadvertently: the abduction of a young girl that occurred around the same time.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“That’s why I need the tape.”
“Difficult to obtain.”
“After today, Pakad, I’d say your country owes me the favor.”
* * * *
A
plainclothes officer finally climbed behind the wheel and drove them to National Police headquarters in Jerusalem. Ben’s car had been impounded and would be returned to him upon his release.
Danielle promised to do everything she could to obtain the tape, if it existed, making no promises since cooperative police efforts had been few and far between as of late.
“Actually,” Danielle said when they were alone again in a debriefing room at National Police headquarters, “there’s something you can do for me as well. A shopkeeper was murdered in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda marketplace two nights ago: an Israeli named Hyram Levy, better known as the Engineer. Levy was acquainted with a number of Palestinians.”
“And, naturally, they are suspects.”
“Just among the usual ones we’d like to round up. Smugglers, specifically, the kind Levy was known to consort with.”
“If he was known to do business with them, what do you need my help for?”
“Because Levy employed an unusual filing system—a bunch of scribbling on memo pages, mostly. We have first names and
nicknames, but no last names.”
“So you need a list of known smugglers in the West Bank and Gaza to find potential matches.”
“Exactly. We’re doing the same with Israeli smugglers and criminals connected to Levy. Whoever killed Levy locked the door behind him after he left. That means someone capable of making a key, or working a lock without one.”
“Or given a key by your victim.”
“We’re looking into that as well.”
Ben considered the prospects. “This list in exchange for that surveillance tape?”