Pillars of Solomon - [Kamal & Barnea 02]

by By Jon Land

  A grunt that sounded like—-

  A knee cracked into Ben’s chin before he could complete the thought. His teeth rattled. His lower jaw felt like someone had twisted it all the way around. He lurched backward.

  The figure caught him with another blow, across the face this time. Ben felt something crinkle in his neck, realized he could smell and taste the mortar of ancient bricks. His legs lost all feeling and gave out. He felt his eyes fading and looked up one last time as the shape moved away from him into the meager light of the street, face faintly illuminated by a cracked streetlamp.

  A woman! Ben realized, before he finally passed out.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 31

  W

  hat happened next, Papa? You have to tell me!”

  David Wolfe finished tucking his granddaughter in. “Tomorrow, Tali.”

  She pouted and crossed her arms dramatically over the covers. “Always tomorrow.”

  He pinched her cheek. “Don’t make that face.”

  “I’ll stop if I can have two questions.”

  “One.”

  “Two!”

  “One, and that’s my final offer.”

  “When was Revkah Rossovitch’s baby born?”

  “A few months later.”

  “A few months after Jacob Rossovitch was killed and his friends got their revenge ...”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did the friends come back and take care of the baby like they promised?”

  David Wolfe raised a pair of fingers in the air. “That’s two questions, Tali.”

  “You still haven’t told me the secret yet.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You promised!”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  “I’m old enough to hear the secret now, you know.”

  He stroked his granddaughter’s forehead, felt her latch a hand onto his wrist when he started to move away from the bed.

  “Papa?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Tali’s eyes followed him as he headed from her room into the hall, leaving the door open a crack behind him. Wolfe realized his wrist throbbed a little where his granddaughter had grabbed it, another sign of age and the arthritis that was eating its way through his body. He had never cataloged all the various injuries suffered during his youth, but now age was doing it for him. And the funny thing was that every time he felt a twinge, his mind flashed back to its original cause—the time, the place, and the circumstances.

  Maybe not so funny.

  David Wolfe had not a single medal in his possession. He had scars instead, more than he could count and plenty that would slip from his memory until a rainy day or misplaced step brought them back.

  Stairs had become especially difficult for him lately, and he found himself clutching the banister harder and harder. He was glad the men downstairs were waiting for him in the study since it would keep them from seeing his slow, stiff-legged descent.

  The worst thing was that David Wolfe didn’t feel old, not really. His body seemed to be cheating him, getting even for all he had done to it in another lifetime as David Wollchensky. He would have gladly made peace, but it was too late.

  The three men waiting for him in the book-lined study of his Greenwich, Connecticut, home looked uniformly grave. Wolfe closed the cherry-wood double doors behind him and shuffled toward the arrangement of leather chesterfield chairs and couches set before the fireplace.

  “Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting.” They rose politely and Wolfe got waved them back down. “I know you wouldn’t have come out here if it wasn’t important. You know how I feel about conducting business at home.”

  ”A serious problem has come up,” started Joshua Davies. At thirty-five he was the youngest of the three; a sabra and the son of a friend of Wolfe’s in Israel, he had gone to college in the United States at Harvard and then stayed to join Wolfe Enterprises.

  The other two men, Marcus Stern and Abraham Belfidi, were both in their fifties and had been with Wolfe for years, dating back to their days serving under him in Israel. They had come to America shortly after Wolfe in 1978, the only two people privy to all his secrets.

  “Is this problem the reason I notice someone has posted guards on my property?” Wolfe asked, stopping before Davies with hands clasped behind his back.

  The younger man nodded. “I’m afraid so: an Israeli police inspector has established a link between the murder of Hyram Levy and the bombing in Atarim Square. She was with Max Pearlman when the failed attack occurred.” He paused. “And, earlier today, she called your private office line and asked for you.”

  “She what?”

  “The call was placed from National Police Headquarters. We have her voice on tape.”

  “What is her name, this police inspector?”

  “Danielle Barnea,” said Davies.

  “Barnea . . .” He turned toward Stern and Belfidi, who were seated together on a couch. “My God, I knew her father. I’m sure I did. But how could she possibly have ...”

  “We don’t know yet,” the younger man told him. “Clearly, though, she has made the connection between you and the others.”

  Wolfe scoffed at his comment. “We were virtually inseparable for the better part of thirty years. Not a very difficult feat to manage, establishing this link.” Across from him, Davies looked no less resolute. “You think I’m in danger then.”

  “I think we need to play things safe, that’s all for now.”

  “What about later?”

  “If this police inspector knows you’re Wollchensky, she will try and warn you,” proposed Stern. “You’re the fourth friend, after all.”

  “She’s trying to keep me alive, that’s what you’re saying.”

  Stern nodded. “But if Barnea’s good enough to have made that connection, she’s good enough to uncover the others.”

  “Then she’s trying to save my life.”

  “At the same time she learns why it’s being threatened.”

  “Something we cannot afford to have her find out,” added Belfidi grimly. “It seems she has left us with no choice.”

  Wolfe scowled. “I told you, I knew her father.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “But I do. You want we should become murderers, Abraham? Killing innocent people in the performance of their jobs?”

  “You used to tell me no one was innocent.”

  “I also told you there were lines we didn’t cross, that those lines are what separate us from our enemies. You want me to change that now?” Wolfe chuckled dryly, shook his head. “If we intend to kill everyone who gets anywhere near the truth, we will need a lot of bullets, my friends.”

  “We only need one,” persisted Stern.

  Wolfe stood up and shuffled over until he was directly in front of the man. “Then use it on me.”

  Stern leaned backward instead. “So we sit here and hope Danielle Barnea does not uncover the truth.”

  “No,” said Wolfe, “we hope she doesn’t believe it, even if she does.”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 32

  A

  woman, you say?” Colonel Nabril al-Asi said at the conclusion of Ben Kamal’s story the next morning.

  “I’m positive,” Ben reiterated. “Just not like any other woman I’ve ever seen.”

  Ben shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Everything physical had been uncomfortable for him since last night. His entire body ached and bore the signs of several deep bruises. His nose was swollen and he could barely move his jaw. He had managed to sleep only with the help of some painkillers he had found in his medicine cabinet.

  Al-Asi caught the hard stare in Ben’s eyes. “You don’t think she’s one of mine, do you?” He sounded genuinely hurt, insulted. “The Protective Security Service does not employ women.”

  “Precisely why I thought she might be one of yours, Colonel.”

 
Al-Asi smiled. “So I had her follow you, then save your life, and now I’m denying it. If that were the case, Inspector, you would owe me an entire suit, not just a tie.” He leaned forward. “I believe in the meantime we should focus our attention on your attackers. You are certain they were not Hamas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just as I am as certain as I can be that neither were they part of one of our overlapping security agencies.”

  “What about the butcher shop?”

  AI-Asi regarded him ruefully. “Do you really need to ask?”

  “You found nothing, then ...”

  “We found blood, just what you would expect from such a place.”

  “Not human blood.”

  “We’re analyzing the samples. Without bodies to go along with it, though, I wouldn’t expect much, no matter what our analysis determines.”

  “What does that leave us with, Colonel?”

  “My question exactly.”

  * * * *

  B

  en climbed back into his car outside Palestinian Authority headquarters. The day had barely begun and already he was exhausted, his sleep the night before turned restless by tortuous dreams, thanks to the painkillers he had downed before nodding off. In one dream he woke to find Zaid Jabral seated in the chair set in the corner of his bedroom. It wasn’t a rocking chair, but in the dream Jabral was rocking slowly.

  “What are you doing here?” Ben asked him.

  “We need to talk.”

  In the dream Ben saw that Jabral’s face was burned away, exposing bone and pulp. His lips had shrunk like charred paper, his teeth left in a perpetual grin. His clothes were tattered and still smoldering. Ben smelled smoke, but he wasn’t scared.

  Jabral rose from the chair and hopped a little on his bad leg. “See, it works again. No cane. Did you find the videotape I left for you in my apartment interesting, my interview with Israel’s new prime minister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Come on, Inspector. It’s all there.”

  “What is?”

  “The reason why I’m dead, why they killed me.”

  “Who?”

  Jabral sat back down and shook his head. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all in the tape, everything you need to know.”

  “Why are you toying with me?”

  “I don’t have much else to do.” Jabral winked, and more of his face seemed to slide away, the grin widening. “Maybe things really aren’t clear until you die. That’s one of the advantages. It would make a great story. I think I’ll go and write it. . . .”

  Jabral started to drift into darkness, like viewing a screen fading to black. Ben could see right through him.

  “Wait!”

  “I’ve got to go. Sorry.”

  “Tell me what I’m missing! Tell me what’s on the tape!”

  But Jabral’s ghost disappeared, his perpetual smile the last of him to fade away.

  Ben woke up with a start, the dream fresh in his mind and his eyes drawn to the corner where Jabral had been sitting. He lumbered out of bed and moved to the chair, half expecting to find blood and strips of blackened flesh staining the upholstery.

  The old wing chair showed nothing but wear, though, leaving Ben to wonder if there was anything to what the ghost had told him as he pushed the chair with his hand to see if he could make it rock. Then he stood in the shower and replayed Jabral’s interview with Ari Bar-Rosen in his mind over and over again in search of some clue he had neglected, without success.

  After his meeting with al-Asi at Palestinian Authority headquarters, he drove to the rooming house in Bethlehem where Ramira Taji lived. The building was originally planned as a residential care facility for seniors on a Jewish settlement that was abandoned halfway through construction. So it was enclosed today by the shells of structures the Palestinian Authority intended to complete but hadn’t quite gotten around to yet.

  Ben planned to ask the old woman to repeat for him exactly what she had told Jabral about the child that had been stolen from her in the refugee camp all those years before. He would tell her the story had caught his eye, that he was willing to help her in his capacity as a police officer.

  It wasn’t a lie.

  He found the landlady, an old woman with leathery skin missing her front teeth, tending to a small garden in front of the house. Taking geraniums from their pots and replanting them in the ground.

  “Does Ramira Taji live here?”

  The landlady barely looked up from her work. “She did.”

  “Did?”

  “She died.”

  “When?”

  “Let me see . . . Five days ago.”

  Just a few days before Jabral was murdered, Ben noted.

  The landlady pushed herself to her feet. Her dress was dark with dirt around the knees. “Are you a relative? Because she owes me two weeks’ rent if you are.”

  “I’m a policeman. How did she die?”

  “In her sleep, peacefully.Haududallah. First time I ever saw her look happy. Maybe because she died owing me money.”

  “Did the doctors say anything else about what caused her death?”

  “Doctors? The attendants came and took her away when I called. Why would a doctor need to see her?”

  “Of course,” Ben said, certain he would get nowhere with the landlady. “My mistake.”

  * * * *

  B

  en found Danielle Barnea waiting when he got back to his office at police headquarters in Jericho.

  “Looks familiar,” she greeted, moving her eyes about the room. “I’d have thought once you became a hero you would have rated a bigger office.”

  “I decided to stay. I like the view.”

  Danielle noted the absence of any windows. “There isn’t any view.”

  “That’s what I like about it.”

  Ben kissed her lightly on the cheek, feeling her lips brush politely against him.

  “Your face is swollen,” Danielle realized. “Reminds me of the last time we worked together.”

  “It’s always nice to relive happier times.”

  “I brought something with me that should make you happy again,” Danielle said, and she extracted an envelope from her shoulder bag. “One of the names on that list of suspected Palestinian smugglers you gave me matched up with a set of fingerprints lifted from Levy’s shop: Ibrahim Mudhil.”

  “Do I know this man?”

  “As a matter of fact, you do,” Danielle said, pulling the smuggler’s picture from the envelope and handing it to Ben. “He’s the man who kidnapped Leila Fatuk.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 33

  B

  en recognized the scarred-over, empty eye socket instantly. His gaze drifted to his bulletin board and the picture Israeli computers had enhanced yesterday of Leila Fatuk’s kidnapper: Ibrahim Mudhil.

  “So a man who abducts children in the West Bank,” Ben said, “is now a murder suspect in Israel.”

  “We have no proof that he’s a murderer, only that he was inside Hyram Levy’s shop the day he was killed.”

  “So what’s our next step?”

  “We join forces again. Mudhil lives in Hebron, strictly off-limits to us in a situation like this.”

  “It never stopped you before.”

  “Before, it was the military. This is a police matter.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I’m in charge, for one thing. The fact that a man like Mudhil would smell an Israeli coming from the border, for another. We need to work this together . . . for both our benefits.”

  “A joint effort.”

  “Yes.”