The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  For years Nathan had insulated himself from such things—the only evil he encountered was disorder in the laboratory, which always made him explosively angry; but his brother’s tale of that severed head began to haunt him. He started to meet with Emanuel and his friends the Halevys. While disdaining Jules Halevy’s bombast he liked the quieter talks with Emanuel and Halevy’s wife Rachel. The talk always turned to the Third Temple, to the prospects of restoring the house of God and the peace of the world to come that Reb Levinsky had always spoken of.

  “Messiah will not come until the Temple is built,” Halevy insisted. “We are responsible for the preparations. No one else. The Mount must be swept clean. God is waiting for the Jews to earn this peace that we say we so ardently want.”

  “But Rambam says that Messiah himself will build the temple,” Emanuel had said, citing the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, known as Rambam. “Are you so certain that it is our task?”

  At this Halevy would hurl the opinions of dozens of other sages who thought otherwise. It is our task to give God a nudge, Halevy would say. Nathan occasionally felt a twinge of the old satisfaction at seeing his brother bested. But what he had once considered Emanuel’s maddening imperviousness he now looked on fondly; his brother would simply close his heavy lids and then raise another issue.

  “War with the Muslims? Does God want that? Do you think they would stand idle while we dismantle their holy places?”

  “Rambam also said that Amalek must be destroyed before the temple will be built,” Halevy pointed out. “You see, I can quote Maimonides as well as you.” At this everyone in the room fell silent. “Amalek” was code for the Arabs.

  “We would be crushed,” Nathan protested.

  “We are like olives—only when we are crushed do we give the best that is in us!” Halevy couldn’t quote the Talmud without shouting.

  Then Rachel Halevy would close the argument with a quiet challenge: “We talk and talk. We’ve talked for millennia. When will we act?”

  Around this discussion the Mishmar was formed—at first just a few friends, then a small army, all dedicated to seeing the Third Temple on the Mount in their lifetimes. The first time they marched around the Temple Mount on Tisha b’Av—the anniversary of the destruction of the temple—they drew little interest. But soon the Mishmar found new ways of getting attention.

  Nervously, Nathan had joined with his brother and their friends one bright summer afternoon to lay the cornerstone of the Third Temple in Jerusalem. It was a huge step. Everyone knew that the police would not allow the activists near the Temple site, so the tension with the Palestinians in the neighborhood was not as great as it might have been. Little Catriel pleaded to go with him, so he propped her on his shoulders and off they went as if to a parade.

  At first things seemed calm enough. The pilgrims opted for an alternative “temporary” site for the great rectangular stone just beyond the Old City wall. A bearded priest anointed the stone and many speeches were made—mostly harmless rabble-rousing, Nathan thought. But as he walked his daughter back to the car a stone struck him in the head. He would never forget the sightless shock of that instant. At once he thought he had been blinded, but then he looked up and through dizzying pain he could see a face peering down at him from the wall of the Old City. It was the cherubic face of a laughing Palestinian boy.

  Briefing Room, Shin Bet Headquarters, St. Helena Street, 1115h

  Toad stood in the shadow, hands in pockets, while photographs raced across the walls and the people seated in the darkened room tried to make sense of them. They had stopped protesting at Kristall’s cigarettes; there was no point. If someone glared at her she put it out but within minutes unconsciously lit a new one. The fumes filled the room. This and the posturing of certain people at the table usually repelled him, and he avoided meetings like this one as far as he could. Today Toad didn’t care; his face was impassive, but the story on the wall—or rather, lack of a story—had captivated him. He focused hard on a picture on one of the side screens: a bullet hole as clean as he had ever seen, as if drawn there by an artist, precisely positioned between the two eyes of the victim.

  An analyst was droning on in fragmentary sentences “…standard 9-millimeter bullet. Fairly close range, no angle of penetration to speak of, dead on point. Death probably instantaneous, twelve to fifteen hours before examination.”

  “And you say the bullet matches the ones found in Shor’s body?” Kristall asked.

  “Same weapon involved in both.”

  As she customarily did, Kristall began to choke out her summary of the day’s findings. “So this morning we find Talal Bukmun, an old enemy of ours, stuffed into a drain in the Old City, shot through the head by the same gun that killed Emanuel Shor in Haifa four days ago. The only person known to be in the vicinity in both instances is this Nasir al-Ayoub. Where is he now?”

  “At the P.A. Administration in Nablus.”

  “We can take him when he leaves,” Kristall said. “I want to talk to him.”

  The Prime Minister was reluctant. He was clearly upset that Bukmun had never been brought in by his own people, although he was ready to release a fuzzy statement to the press that a “true enemy of Israel” had been neutralized. At the same time he was anxious to avoid problems with the Palestinian Authority by arresting one of their highest-ranking security people. “But this Ayoub couldn’t have killed Bukmun. The man was already dead when Ayoub appeared on the scene at eight o’clock last night. Isn’t that right, Sefardi?”

  Toad was so quiet he could barely be heard. “Possibly,” he said. “By the acoustic evidence, a silenced gun could have caused the noise we heard a few minutes before eight.”

  “But that doesn’t mean Ayoub didn’t do it,” Kristall said. “That area is a maze of drains and tunnels. Ayoub could have come up into the shop the same way Bukmun did, killed him, pulled the body into the hole with him, and then surfaced again in time to meet his appointment and throw off our investigators.”

  “That seems a lot to accomplish in so short a time.”

  “Look at the schematic.” Kristall pointed her cigarette at a diagram on the wall of color-coded tunnels under the streets of the Old City. “He could have come up in the next street, dusted himself off, and been around the corner in minutes.”

  “What do you think, Sefardi?” the minister asked. “Is it possible?”

  “I suppose so,” Toad mumbled back. He knew that Shin Bet men were clambering around the tunnels trying to reproduce that very possibility as they spoke, and he didn’t like to commit himself before the facts were in.

  “It’s farfetched,” the Prime Minister replied. “Besides, what reason would Ayoub have to kill Bukmun? What connection could Bukmun possibly have to this business with Shor?”

  “There might be a connection that’s not apparent yet.” Kristall blew out smoke. “It’s also possible there’s no connection. Maybe this Ayoub is a contractor. Let’s focus for a moment on what we know about Bukmun. Didi?”

  Didi Mattanyah liked Kristall but not tobacco smoke, so she sat at the far end of the table in her usual flower-print dress. She spoke rapidly. “Bukmun was an old-style gun runner from his days with Hamas, bringing in weapons piecemeal for years. Active in both Intifadas. He was the kind of kid Arafat disliked but needed in the old days. Since then things have got more civilized. We’ve obviously been looking for him for a long time; best evidence is that he’s been underground the last three years.”

  “Any reason for him to surface now?” Kristall asked. “And why would he expose himself so dangerously as to use a telephone?”

  “Everyone slips. No one plays the game perfectly. If they did, we’d be out of business. We were interested in Bukmun after the Great Synagogue attack; whoever did it used the type of weapon Bukmun was known to deal in. The key is the shopkeeper.”

  “What
shopkeeper?” the minister asked.

  Didi gave him her best motherly response. “When Toad—um, Sefardi—came in with the news this morning, we immediately pulled in the owner of the shop where Bukmun’s body was found. He was a gold mine. He was already sweating hard and it took very little to open him up. It turns out that Bukmun was living in his mother’s house in al-Azariya—Bethel Village—which we very quietly searched about an hour ago. Under the floor was found, among other interesting antiquities, a discarded casing from a Hawkeye missile—the type used on the Great Synagogue.”

  “Ayoub could be a response to blackmail,” Kristall said. “Bukmun supplies the weapon for the attack on the synagogue and then tries to extort something from the people who did it. Muslim extremists. Maybe that’s what the telephone call was about. So they tell Ayoub to finish him off.”

  “There’s one big baffling problem with that.” The Prime Minister turned on Kristall again. “The same type of weapon was used on Al-Aqsa the same day. It’s an interesting group of Muslim extremists who try to deflect attention from themselves by blowing up their own holy mosque.”

  Then a bulky man with white hair known to Toad as the head of Interpol spoke up. “We’re taking our eyes off the main issue: Shor, or rather the reason Shor was killed. Now we have a breakthrough. This man Ayoub is our best chance for recovery.”

  “So, as I said, it’s time to pick him up,” Kristall said.

  “I disagree.” The Interpol man was watching her. “He’s made no move to flee. He’s a professional—not the kind who talks. Let’s watch him but don’t get near him. Keep Bukmun out of the media.” The Prime Minister looked disappointed. “Put every tracking tool we have on him so that if he belches we know it.”

  Kane stepped into the sunshine and breathed in the warm air. At last he could take a break from the putrid smoke and politics of these Israeli bureaucrats. He respected Mattanyah; she was a sharp investigator. And the nondescript little man who had pulled the terrorist’s body from a drain seemed resourceful. But the people in charge were another story.

  He nodded at his driver, who stood black-lensed and statue-still by his car, and he walked up the street to stretch his legs and to let the heat of the ancient city bake into his body. He hated the cages he was forced to live in. But this heat reminded him of his youth, of the Marines, of the exhilarating danger of the peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Iraq. Of course, there was also that freezing spring “yomping” across the Falklands when he had felt the freest of his life. But the Middle East was another home, so bright and warm, so different from the green enclosures of England.

  People now moved past him on the street like nervous animals. The heat was ruining this country. Water supplies in danger, trees dying, flowers nonexistent—too many years of drought had brought sand and dust hills into the city. Like others in his business, Kane knew that the climate had become a time bomb, but no one talked about it—the people in charge had chosen to ignore the facts and wait for the next generation to deal with it. It wasn’t a policeman’s place to talk policy. In any case, the next generation was not his concern. And he liked the heat.

  He had learned to love it more than four decades before, when he was dropped into the desert by helicopter to support the UN mission in southern Lebanon. The others complained, but he took off his shirt and let the sun scorch out of him the pain of being young. He loved the ache and the sweat of climbing the mountainous rocks, of gazing out at the distant shimmer of Galilee. He had absorbed so much of the lore of this place from Ian Mandelyn. He knew that Jesus himself had walked here, that Gideon and Samson and King David had hunted here. He even came to like the people, their humble grins and their angelic simplicity, which was not natural for him. Patrolling from village to village, he was a warrior who had never been at such peace.

  Most of all he remembered the children, their beauty, their eyes the color of coffee, their impossibly thin limbs protruding from red or green or white gingham, their hopeful little games in the street. His bitterest memory was finding a piece of cotton in a bush, then another, and finally two little boys, dead, torn by shrapnel from some stray artillery shell—whether it was Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or Israel or even his own forces who had fired it he never knew and did not care.

  At that moment he decided on the path he would take. Until then his heart had been brittle. Now it became tough, hardened by the suffering of those children in an off-the-books war few cared about. It was ironic—no one felt the irony more deeply than he—that he had been forced to shed so much blood to bring them a better world. But he tried to think as little as possible about that.

  Suddenly hungry, he stopped to buy shwarma from a sidewalk vendor and sat on a taxi-rank bench to eat it. He began turning over in his mind the events of the morning. It was important to stay ahead of these people. This business with the terrorist was a distraction. He would never understand why it was so easy for people in his business to take their eyes off the problem, even to forget why they did what they did. Of course, mostly it was due to politics, that diverting enterprise that led to so much ruin. Forty years of sheer focused climbing had brought him to the top of his profession. Driven by something deeper, he had stayed well clear of politics, throwing off old obsessions, brooking no distractions.

  Except one.

  His GeMphone rang and he smiled to himself when he recognized the sudden voice in his ear. “I have the inscription,” she said. “I know what it means.”

  Palestinian Authority Administrative Headquarters, Nablus, 1115h

  As he walked in the door Nasir al-Ayoub privately saluted, as he always did, the eagle and the sword on the flag of Palestine. But his mind was elsewhere; he wondered what that old terror Bukmun might have had to say to him. He would never know now, of course, that Bukmun was dead.

  The Prime Minister, accompanied by three other security men, stopped Nasir in the entry. He was a bald man with kind eyes and a mustache that seemed a sort of hobby for him. He touched it and played in it constantly.

  “And how is the Sheikh?” he asked gravely after greeting Nasir.

  “Candidly, as well as can be expected.”

  “Tell him I’ll see him very soon, God willing.”

  Nasir was genuinely pleased and said so. He checked his firearm with the security guard and continued toward the deputy’s office to make his report.

  The deputy, in his customary plaid shirt and khaki trousers, met Nasir at the door. Although the man was from the scruffy old school of Arafat, Nasir respected him; he was pleasant and brisk and offered Nasir a cigarette. They both smoked.

  “So. Any progress?”

  “The other side is apparently as baffled as we are. But they are not thinking about the Great Synagogue now. Something else, something bigger has come up. The head of Interpol is meeting with them as we speak.”

  “The murder of the biochemist.”

  “May be related, but oddly enough he was only the key to getting in somewhere else at Technion. Something important has been stolen. It’s called a ‘lattice.’ ”

  “I’ll have our researchers get on to it. Do you have an idea what this lattice is?”

  “It’s not clear to me,” Nasir replied, shaking his cigarette over the ashtray. “It was taken from the Nanoelectronics laboratory.”

  The deputy sat back and grinned at Nasir. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever tell me how you know these things?”

  “My contacts are my own,” he grinned back. “It wouldn’t be productive to tell you, believe me.”

  “But what has any of this to do with Al-Aqsa?”

  “That I can’t say. I’ve been doing the routine stuff, watching the Mishmar and getting closer to some of the other cult groups. But you know that everything is connected somehow.”

  The deputy grimaced. “Just make sure you stay focused. Whoever hit Al-Aqsa has got to be found and dealt with
.”

  “I know. And thanks for getting me back to this assignment. I wasn’t looking forward to shepherding the Pope around the country.”

  “It was God who changed your assignment, not I.”

  Nasir put out his cigarette and stood up to leave. “I’m sorry. I have another appointment downstairs in a few minutes. As soon as I have more, I’ll get with you.” At the door he turned. “Incidentally, Talal Bukmun was shot dead last night in the Old City.”

  The deputy looked appropriately stunned. “Bukmun? In the Old City?”

  Nasir nodded.

  “They got him at last. In the Old City, you say? What on earth would he have been doing there?”

  “Another connection I can’t make for you. Not yet.”

  The old deputy looked pensively at Nasir. “There was a time we would have hit them back hard for this.” He leaned over the desk in a stream of smoke and rubbed his eyes. “Someone ought to pay, don’t you think?”

  Nasir nodded almost imperceptibly.

  The deputy sat back again in his chair. “I wonder why they haven’t announced it; they usually gloat over the airwaves over this sort of thing.”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Then how in the world did you know about it?”

  But Nasir merely waved and headed off to the canteen and lunch with his father’s doctor.

  Rabia al-Adawi sat drinking coffee in the drab little room, a rainbow scarf hiding her face from him as he entered. She had evidently walked from the Health Ministry because her face when revealed glowed from the heat outside.

  “Nasir,” she greeted him, touching his hand. A gifted oncologist, she had been co-opted into the government not only for her expertise but also as an exhibit to the outside world of a successful Palestinian professional woman.

  To Nasir she meant considerably more. Their fathers were old friends from their days at Cairo University, and Rabia and Nasir had virtually grown up together. Her own long absence studying in Cairo and then establishing her practice had created a remoteness between them. But she was still striking, her eyes black and her skin like burnished olive wood.