by By Jon Land
Danielle hung up her phone, making sure to turn off the computer before leaving the room.
* * * *
I
think we found your man,” the technician explained as soon as she and Yori Resnick entered his windowless cubicle in the subbasement of National Police headquarters. He was balding, with slender wisps of hair hanging down both sides of his face. He squinted as he gazed at the screen, neglecting the eyeglasses held in a case clipped to the pocket of his lab coat. “The print match was ninety-five percent.”
Danielle noticed a file scrawling slowly across the screen. “Who is he?”
The technician hit a key and the scrawling stopped. “His name is Ibrahim Mudhil: in a nutshell, one nasty son of a bitch.”
He turned back to the screen, continued to speak without reading from it.
“Mudhil spent two separate stretches in our Ansar 3 detention camp between 1983 and 1991. Since then he’s been incarcerated three times. Once by us—he was let out after the Oslo Accords. And twice, for briefer periods, by the Palestinians.”
“For smuggling?”
“No. Not yet anyway.”
Danielle nodded, impressed. “How long has he been out?”
The technician gestured offhandedly toward the screen. “According to this, over two years, but it’s hard to tell since much of our intelligence-sharing apparatus broke down during that period.”
“I’ll need a picture.”
The technician reached across the desk. “I have one for you right here.”
“And the most recent address you have.”
“Hebron,” he said, handing her the picture.
“Hebron?” Yori Resnick raised grimly. “The one place we’ll never be able to operate without Palestinian cooperation.”
Danielle was still gazing intently at Ibrahim Mudhil’s picture. “Actually, Yori, I think they’ll be happy to help.” She handed the picture to him. “More than happy.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 29
B
en approached the butcher shop just before eleven o’clock that night to learn what the suddenly reluctant and tentative Nazir Jalabad had discovered. He had come straight from Zaid Jabral’s apartment, having viewed the tape the journalist had left atop his television again and again.
The first time he pushed play, Ben had half expected Jabral himself to appear on the brightening screen and explain what he had discovered, why he had been killed. A witness to his own murder.
Instead, though, a shaky, blurred picture of two men seated in chairs across from each other took shape. Disappointed, Ben was half ready to turn the television off until the focus sharpened and he made out Jabral seated directly across from Ari Bar-Rosen, Israel’s newly elected prime minister. The interview had been conducted outside in a hotly disputed area of the West Bank, where a Palestinian settlement lay unfinished in the shadow of an Israeli one where construction was proceeding furiously. It had to, since Ari Bar-Rosen had promised to shut construction down as one of his first acts upon officially taking office in less than a week’s time now.
“What can the Palestinian people expect from you?” Jabral started.
“Fairness and truth.”
“I notice you did not say a homeland.”
“Because that is not a decision one man can make. I pledged to work toward the formation of a Palestinian state and I intend to keep that pledge. But it would be naive to expect to encounter no obstacles along the way.”
“By obstacles, you mean the outgoing administration.”
The wind picked up and blew Bar-Rosen’s still-thick salt-and-pepper hair about. He was fifty but looked ten years younger, a robustly healthy man with hypnotic gray eyes. He smiled frequently, but only when he meant it. He had succeeded first to control of the Labor Party and then to a sweeping victory in the special election on a forceful, uncompromising, and unapologetic platform.
He wiped something from his eye. “I mean the mentality that administration created. A mentality of punitive actions dispensed toward no achievable goal. My predecessor came into office promising peace with security and gave Israel neither.”
“Is that the primary reason for the two-to-one deficit he ran in the polls?”
“Common sense accounts for that. What Hamas fears more than anything is mutual acceptance of our two peoples, because that would destroy their reason for being. Peace is the weapon that can most effectively destroy them. So they lashed out, sent their suicide bombers into Jerusalem to create one scene of horror after another. And when each act of terror brought us further from the Oslo Accords and a chance at peace, they continued to perpetuate those acts. The outgoing administration refused to fight them with the greatest weapon at its disposal: the pursuit of peace no matter what.
“My predecessor closed the borders and angered millions for the actions of tens. But closing the borders didn’t help, and the vindictive measures served only to motivate those with a mentality capable of strapping explosives to their own bodies and yanking the fuse. The only way Israel can ever be truly safe is to destroy terrorism’s reason for being. And that lies in the formation of a Palestinian state.”
“You have also pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to Palestinian housing and infrastructure.”
“Actually,” Bar-Rosen corrected, “I have pledged a figure equal to whatever we invest in settlements completed or expanded on disputed land. The funds will be turned over to the Palestinian Authority to be rationed however it sees fit.”
“Disputed land like where we are sitting now?”
“More or less.”
“But you have promised to shut down construction on the settlement going up on your right.”
Bar-Rosen smiled and laced his thick workman’s hands together before him. “That is because the outgoing administration strategically chose this location after giving the Palestinians permission to build a road, so long as no Israeli settlement was inconvenienced. The road was designed to go straight through where we are sitting now that way”—here, Bar-Rosen extended a finger toward the Israeli construction site—”where a settlement will soon lie.”
“Meaning no road.”
“Exactly.”
“So no settlement.”
“No Israeli lives there or had signed up to live there. The decision would not displace anyone.”
“But do you really think peace is possible?”
Bar-Rosen thought briefly before responding. His olive skin glowed beneath the sun and he swiped at his forehead with his sleeve the way a man used to working in the fields might. “I was born on a kibbutz not far from a Palestinian town that had managed to stay intact. As a child growing up in the fifties, I remember the Palestinian children coming to pick oranges with us. We were too young to understand we were supposed to hate each other. We got along, and that is what peace means to our peoples: getting along. Coexisting with open borders, open trade, and open societies no longer mired in mistrust. It may take generations before our cultures grow together, if they ever do. But that doesn’t mean they have to continue to grow apart. Enough people have died. The alternative hasn’t worked for either of us. So I’m saying to you what I said to the Israeli people during my campaign:
“Let’s give something else a chance. . . .”
Jabral’s interview with Ari Bar-Rosen had been published well before his article on Ramira Taji had run, and almost certainly bore no connection to his pursuit of the story that had led to his death. Still, Ben had watched the tape hoping there might be some clue there, something even Jabral himself hadn’t realized right away. But if there was, he couldn’t find it.
As a result, he had lingered in Jabral’s apartment much longer than planned and then rushed to get to the butcher shop in time. The back door was unlocked, and Ben opened it and entered.
The room was almost totally dark, and the forty-degree temperatures, in such contrast to the warm night air, chilled him immediately.
“Nazir,” he called sof
tly, his breath clouding before him. “Nazir?”
Ben felt blindly across the wall, having no idea where the light switch was located. He gave up and drew the small flashlight from his pocket instead. The beam struck the cold mist gathering in the air and made it look like fog.
“Nazir,” Ben called again, continuing to sweep the small beam past the slabs of hanging beef.
He stopped his light on a side of beef that looked all wrong and quickly saw why. It wasn’t beef hanging from this particular hook, it was a man.
Nazir Jalabad.
* * * *
CHAPTER 30
J
alabad had been stripped naked before someone had impaled him on the hook amid the rest of the stripped carcasses. The rising stench of his corpse, mixed with the sour scents of the various meats, made Ben quiver and force a surge of bile back down his throat. He bent over at the waist, wretching, and found himself staring at the blood that had pooled beneath the dead man’s body.
But that was not all, Ben realized, shuddering.
Jalabad’s right hand was missing, just a jagged bone layered with strips of flesh where it had been. His right foot was gone too, but Ben could see the white of the bone, the cut looking perfectly clean. Nazir’s tongue hung obscenely from his mouth. And his eyes . . .
His eyes had been gouged out.
Punishment for crossing Hamas, Ben thought, an instant before the lights in the back room switched on, and Ben blinked in the sudden glare.
At least a dozen figures wearing black masks appeared from every side, all wielding pistols. Hamas.
”Drop your gun,” one of the masked men ordered.
Ben slid it from his holster and let it drop to the floor without protest. A hand grabbed his head and spun him around, back toward Nazir Jalabad’s corpse.
“This is what happens when you see something you’re not supposed to,” the same voice accused. “Talk and it will be easier for you than it was for him.”
“I don’t know what—”
The hands grasping him shook him viciously. Then Ben felt a blade pressed against his throat.
“Who else have you told about your investigation?”
Ben recognized the knife as a jambiya, an Arabian dagger with a dual-edged, curved blade. “What investiga—”
“The missing children!” the voice blared, and the hands slammed his head into the wall.
Ben’s eyes watered. Blood dribbled out from both his nostrils.
“You will tell us what you have learned!”
“Nothing.”
“You will tell us who you have told.”
“No one.”
The powerful hands spun Ben and slammed him face-first into the wall this time. “I will ask you again: who else knows about the missing children?”
“There’s nothing to know. I don’t know anything myself. And why would Hamas care?”
“You think we are Hamas?”
“You mean you’re—”
“What else did your dead friend learn? What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing,” Ben replied, more scared now that the identity of his assailants, and Nazir Jalabad’s murderers, was a mystery. If they weren’t Hamas, then who were they?
“Liar!”
Ben’s forehead hit first this time. “His niece was one of the victims. He said there had been others, gave me some names. That’s all.”
“Who else was aware of these names?”
“I shared them with no one.”
“And your conclusions?”
“I haven’t reached any yet.”
The man spun Ben around again and pushed him toward a bulk meat slicer that looked like a mounted circular saw. “Since your friend died before he became cooperative, we are forced to rely on you.”
Another black-hooded figure switched the slicer on. The blade began to whirl, blowing away the cold mist that had settled around it. Ben felt himself shoved right up against the long table into which the slicer was built. Only one side of the blade was visible, the rest covered by a housing was splattered with still-moist blood. Ben recalled the stubs where Nazir Jalabad’s missing hand and foot had been and nearly gagged.
“Who was your friend working for?”
”No one. He used to be Hamas, but claimed he was out.”
“Hamas?”
“His story checked out.”
A pair of men now jammed Ben down against the steel table. He could smell the heat of the blade. They turned him on his back, so he was looking up at the black masks.
“You have been to see the Israelis. Have you discussed the missing children with them?”
Danielle, Ben realized. She would be their next stop. . . . “There was no reason to.”
“You went to them for help. What did they tell you?” When Ben didn’t respond fast enough, one of the hooded men grabbed his arm and yanked it sideways. Outstretched, it was almost close enough to touch the furiously spinning blade. The other man jerked Ben onto the table so his hand could reach.
”First a hand, and then a foot. That’s all we could get from Jalabad before shock claimed him. But I think you, Bayan Kamal, will hold out much longer. We’ll be able to get much more off you, unless you tell us what you told the Israelis and what they told you.”
“Why do you care about the Israelis?”
The back of a hand slammed the side of Ben’s face and grazed his nose. He could taste blood in his mouth.
“I don’t know anything!” Ben insisted, and felt his hand dragged closer to the slicing blade.
Suddenly the blade whirred to a halt. The lights flickered and died.
“Find the light switch!” someone ordered.
But it was more than the lights, Ben realized before his captors, it was the power. The hands that held him had relaxed their grip just slightly. He twisted his arms free at the same time he whipped his feet around like a propeller. Both his heels slammed into a flabby midsection, and Ben lurched off the table in that direction, feeling for the figure in the darkness.
Ben made contact just as the man was freeing his pistol again. He twisted the man in close and spun him around hard, slamming his back into the hard edge of one of the carving tables.
”Over there! Over there!” a new voice cried out, and Ben felt certain he had been spotted.
He managed to pull the pistol from the man’s grasp in the next instant and dove to the floor. He had started to crawl for the door when a series of softly muffled sounds froze him.
The silenced gunshots were accompanied by muzzle flashes that seemed everywhere at once. He heard a pair of thuds, and a high-pitched wail that ended as quickly as it had come.
Someone was shooting his captors! Someone was rescuing him!
Ben started crawling again, toward the source of the silenced gunshots.
Muzzle flashes began bursting all around the room, his captors shooting desperately at the unseen gunman. More silenced shots answered the fire, followed by thuds as more of the enemy were dropped.
A door burst open suddenly, bathing the room in a thin wash of light. Ben rose into a crouch and scampered across the floor toward it.
“There! I see him!”
Ben dropped to the floor again and fired the unfamiliar pistol beneath the table at a pair of black-clad legs. The man attached to them went down hard, felled like a tree, his shots pouring into the ceiling. Rising only to his knees, Ben scrambled for the open door.
Just then, a lithe figure spun through it ahead of him, fleeing. The figure seemed to be moving slowly, but was out the door before any of the gunmen could recover.
Ben surged into the corridor and shouldered the door closed. There was a dead bolt just over the knob and he twisted it before his surviving captors could follow him out.
He swung toward the front of the store just as the front door rattled closed. Ben rushed to throw it open and saw the gazellelike figure sprinting away with long, loping strides.
“Hey!” he called, racing after it.
The figure swung left down an alley and Ben followed, holding his own.
“Stop!” he yelled at the end of the alley.
But the shape bolted down the new street and turned rapidly onto a narrow cross-through. Ben was just swinging to follow when he saw the shadow stretching toward him. He ducked, and the garbage-can lid smashed stone instead of his face. He kept his shoulder low and launched himself at the figure, feeling a lean and rock hard midsection as he slammed it into a building. Dust blew out into both of them, and the impact drew a grunt of pain from the person who had saved his life.