by Jon Land
“As well as Israeli. What we’re facing here doesn’t discriminate. You’ll find we have extraordinarily few allies, perhaps just each other.”
“Then how about you deliver Matthew back to Reading School to prove your good faith?”
She looked at him almost sadly. “I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”
“Look, lady, the hag I was talking to a few minutes ago and Fett built a pretty good case. If this bit about Rasin and his weapon are true, then I’m on your side already.”
“Like you were on the side of the French, of the British, even the Americans?” she shot back at him. “I know you better than you think. The side you start out on may not be the side you end up on, depending on the dictates of your conscience. You think I don’t approve of those traits?” she added, more softly, voice laced with admiration. “They are precisely what persuaded me that you were the only one left for me to work with now that my own network has been compromised.”
“Then you also know my word is my bond. Let the boy go. I’ll work with you.”
“I can’t. I made promises, gave assurances. Can’t you see that?”
“What I see every time I close my eyes is what a pair of killers did to John Neville.”
“I don’t condone the actions of butchers.”
“But you used them, didn’t you? Cut the bullshit, lady. If you’re so fond of the way I operate, you must have figured out you’re already working in a bigger ballgame.”
She looked hurt. What little light reached her face told Blaine she was thirty at most and probably younger. Her features were more European than Arabic. She had skin that was soft and smooth, and high cheekbones that complemented an angular chin and large round eyes. Her complexion looked more tanned than naturally bronze.
“Let’s get to the point, Evira,” Blaine resumed. “Let’s get to Rasin. How’d you find out about the existence of this superweapon?”
“I’ve had agents planted within his group for sometime.”
“Arabs?”
“Seventeen percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs, but they’re Israelis first. This is their nation, too. And as their numbers have grown they have been accepted as part of the nation.” She paused. “By most of the nation anyway. Rasin has seized upon the reality of their growing influence, along with the possible formation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, and used them to spread his message of hate. His cause has fostered a dangerous, militant faction. He has become enamored of the power it has provided him. Fanaticism is a powerful voice, Blaine McCracken, one the Arabs of Israel find impossible to silence. He seeks to propel himself into power by creating a climate of fear fanatics thrive in. He has his hardcore followers, along with those afraid to oppose him.”
She leaned farther across the table. “Some months ago, he began holding meetings in secret. Representatives of his movement in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the settlements were all briefed on his discovery of a means to eliminate the Arab problem forever, to destroy the entire Arab world. An agent I planted within Rasin’s camp was present at those briefings. He reported to me what he had heard. That was the last we heard from him. That was just about a month ago, near the time Rasin himself disappeared. He hasn’t been seen since. That’s what made me try to contact you.”
“Destroy the Arab world,” Blaine repeated. “Your contact’s words or Rasin’s?”
“Rasin’s expoundings were bolder, yet vague. Perhaps obliterate would be a better word than destroy. Rasin didn’t state it that way, but what else could we be facing?”
“How did he state it?”
“In shadows and riddles. The Arab peoples both nearest and farthest would be put down in a way that would make it impossible for them to ever rise up again.”
“And yet here we have Israel sitting square in the center of all these Arab peoples. How can this weapon Rasin claims he has destroy one without the other?”
“His briefings were quite clear about this result. ‘An oasis in the middle of the desert of destruction’ were his exact words.”
“Then we must be talking about some kind of selective destruction. What he seems to be talking about is a weapon that can’t possibly exist.”
“Only within the parameters our reason permits us to consider.”
“Your reason, Evira, and your fight. I’ve read the files on you, and if there’s any truth to them at all, then I’ve got to figure you’re just as able to track Rasin down as I am.”
She shrugged. “Perhaps. We’ll never know for sure because I have my own target to pursue: Amir Hassani.”
“An Ar—”
“Go ahead. Finish. You were about to say ‘Arab,’ weren’t you?” She didn’t let him answer. “Yes, I am an Arab, Mr. Blaine McCracken, but my birth place was annexed, which makes me an Israeli, too. My loyalty may be divided, but on both counts Hassani is as much my enemy as Rasin. He is against everything I stand for.”
“And just what is that?”
“Peace. Does that surprise you?”
“Coming from a woman who kidnaps children to further her ends, frankly it does.”
“Not just my ends, Mr. Blaine McCracken, the world’s ends. What do you know of Hassani?”
“No more than anyone else, I suppose. He’s a real enigma, installed as military strongman of a beaten and impoverished Iran in a coup after the war was finally settled with Iraq and Khomeini passed on to the nuthouse in the sky. He came back from exile, à la Khomeini, and promised to return national pride and prosperity to a country sorely lacking in both.”
“And has he?”
“In the past six months things have gotten steadily worse. He woos the wealthy and powerful like the Shah did while giving limitless power to the Revolutionary Guard like Khomeini.”
“And caught in the middle are the Iranian masses who mean nothing to him. But you left out one thing. Hassani has used his position to rally other militant Arab leaders, and he has convinced them that with the Iran-Iraq war no longer serving as a distraction, they can turn all their attention toward a common enemy.”
“Israel,” Blaine surmised.
“Of course. Hassani has brought together a collection of madmen who want nothing more than to see Israel destroyed and collectively are in possession of the means to assure it happens.”
“Then we’re facing two madmen, each of which is poised to destroy the world of the other.”
“And they’ll succeed unless we are successful in stopping them.”
“Stop or kill?”
“One and the same.”
Blaine shook his head mockingly. “This really isn’t your game, is it? Why don’t you just come out and say what you mean: you plan to kill Hassani while I kill Rasin.”
Evira’s eyes were cold. “Whatever is necessary.”
“How did you learn so much about Hassani? You work in Israel, not Iran.”
She just looked at him, and might have been about to speak when Blaine suddenly answered his own question.
“Unless … unless you found out about Hassani’s plans through the agents you planted with Rasin. Of course!”
“You see what I mean now.”
“What I see is an Israeli fanatic with a weapon he intends to use because of what a militant Iranian is planning. In Rasin’s mind, what he’s doing is self-defense, a preventive strike.”
“But it cuts both ways,” Evira explained. “Part of the reason why Hassani has been able at last to unite the various militant factions of the Arab world is the symbol Rasin and his rising popularity presents. His following is no longer limited or hidden away. It is thriving in Israel and it is powerful. Can you imagine the kind of concessions he’ll demand, and the price Israel will be forced to pay, once he and his party capture enough seats in parliament for Rasin to become kingmaker? Hassani and the other madmen cannot wait to find out. They feel Israel must be destroyed before the tide becomes too strong to turn… .”
“Which, accordingly, provides Rasin with the perfect rationale to util
ize his superweapon. My God, it’s almost as if Hassani and the others had played right into his hands.”
“In any case he has the weapon and the justification to unleash it.” Her eyes became pleading. “I couldn’t trust anyone else, don’t you see? Hassani’s people have penetrated my organization, and Rasin’s people are onto me. You were my only hope. Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing if our positions were reversed!”
“I wouldn’t. There’s a code that must not have made it to your part of the world yet. We don’t involve family. We never involve family.”
“Our way of life is facing destruction. Israel’s, too. I hate the militants as much as you do. I’m going to kill Hassani. I want him stopped as much as I want Rasin stopped. This is our only chance to beat down what both of them represent forever.”
“Only to do so you have to employ their methods, so you become no better than they are.” Blaine paused and looked at her with eyes of ice. “Tell me how civilized you are, but first tell me what will happen if I get up from this table and walk away.”
Evira hesitated only slightly. “Your son will die.”
Chapter 7
COLONEL BEN-NESER STOOD nervously in the open warehouse across from the gift shop. Shielded by porcelain fixtures, he gazed across the street, clenching and unclenching his remaining hand into a fist. Evira was barely thirty yards away from him. A quick dash across the street and he could take her himself. Screw the complications and get it over with.
Still, the American Evira was meeting with provided an unexpected complication. Bad enough the colonel should be about to initiate a wholly unsanctioned operation. But if an American, innocent or otherwise, should perish as a result the political fallout might be sufficient to cost Ben-Neser his career.
What little remained of it, that is. He had been born to be a soldier, not a bureaucrat. He came from a tradition of warriors and had proved himself worthy of that legacy as an infantryman in the Six-Day War of ’67. Six years later the Yom Kippur engagement had seen him perform heroically in a leadership capacity until his tenure was ended prematurely. He was rounding up strays when a boy lunged out and tossed a grenade. While the attention of his men remained fixed on the escaping boy, Ben-Neser had focused on the grenade. Calculating instantly that the only hope his squad had of survival lay in his tossing it away from them, he had managed to lift and start to hurl the grenade when it detonated. The colonel’s men were saved, but his arm was reduced to sinews sprouting from the shoulder joint.
The rehabilitation period had been long, and Ben-Neser resisted the use of prostheses and learned to live with a single arm. The best therapy was determination, and he focused all he had into becoming the best marksman in Israel. He learned how to steady the rifle with a single arm and could reload as quickly as any man with two. A decade’s assignments had culminated in a single mistake—a civilian lunging in front of a bullet meant for a much wanted terrorist—and he was reassigned to Mossad as a field control officer, an overseer of other people’s work. With each report, he found himself contemplating not how the operation had been done, but how he would have done it himself. The frustration mounted.
It spilled over when the first hard reports on Evira began to cross his desk. He maneuvered to get himself appointed as head of the team gathering intelligence on her and then became obsessed with putting an end to her shadowy and elusive movements within Israel. In these past two years he had considered nothing else, and when at last a report linked her to a booth in the Jaffa Market, Ben-Neser elected to hold on to the memo and deal with it himself. The commandos with him knew no better. He was their control, after all, and they saw no reason to doubt this sudden change in plans.
“Come in, Colonel,” a voice squawked over his walkie-talkie.
“I read you, Ari.”
“All men are in position. Ready to move on your signal.”
Ben-Neser reviewed for himself the final deployments he had decided on once Evira’s position was confirmed. Besides himself and Ari, he had a detachment of six commandos at his disposal. Of these, two had been placed upon the flat roof of the long angular building that housed Ben-Neser’s location along with a dozen other sidewalk shops. One had been stationed around the corner from the target shop on the chance Evira might manage to flee in that direction. The remaining three were all planted among the locals: one seated before a blanket crammed with cheap watches, a second in apron selling food from a heated pushcart, and a third looking like an eager patron who had yet to purchase a thing.
The phantom pain scratched at Ben-Neser again. Had he already passed the point of no return, or was there still time to abort? No matter the results here today, he knew the ramifications so far as his future was concerned. But he was approaching the end of his run anyway and desperately wanted to take something with him, something beyond the anonymity of the kills he had made over the decade he had served as a marksman.
Ben-Neser turned his walkie-talkie to the channel that connected him with his commandos. “We move on my signal. Get ready. No shooting unless absolutely necessary. Clear? I want her taken alive. That’s the first priority.” He gazed across the street one last time. With the itch of a no-longer-existent arm driving him to shudders, Ben-Neser spoke again. “Thirty seconds, people. On my mark …”
“You don’t have a choice and neither do I,” Evira was saying.
McCracken glared at her from across the table. “Do you really expect to be able to reach Hassani? You’re talking about a man who is almost never seen and about whom virtually nothing is known.”
“Some is known. Enough. The underground movement in Tehran is small but well focused. They will help me.”
“Killing him will almost certainly mean your own death.”
She returned his emotionless stare. “Would you not do the same thing if in my position?”
“I’m still not quite clear on what that position is.”
“I’m an Arab and so is Hassani. Is that it?”
“Not at all.”
“It is in enough ways, Blaine McCracken, and you know it. Yes, I am an Arab, and no one wants to see a Palestinian homeland more than me. I’ve worked most of my life toward that end.” Her voice thickened. “When the soldiers came and—Well, that doesn’t matter now. Hassani speaks to my people in a language of death and violence. He preaches, lives it. Accept that dogma and even with a homeland there can never be peace. Palestinians must get what they deserve, but men like Hassani will never give it to us. To them, we’re just tools for them to use for their own ends.”
“Except there’s also Yosef Rasin,” McCracken told her. “Hassani can kill your dream from one side, Rasin from the other. A pair of fanatics from opposite directions aiming toward the same goal.”
“You will find him. You will stop him.”
Blaine almost laughed. “You overestimate me.”
“No,” Evira retorted immediately. “I have followed your career, studied it. You are driven by ideals and nothing stops you when they are at stake. I … emulate that. I have since the beginning. I obtained all your files. I’ve read everything Israeli and Egyptian intelligence has to say about you.”
“Lies and exaggerations mostly.”
“For the sake of your son, let’s hope not.”
When his count had reached five, Colonel Ben-Neser saw a pair of jeeps crowded with Israeli soldiers pull over to the side of Oley Tsiyon where the flea market splintered to the left down an alley.
“Hold your positions!” he ordered his men. Since this mission was not logged, the area had not been sealed. The army had no idea what was going on. “Ari, come in,” he barked into his walkie-talkie.
“I read you, sir.”
“Do you see them?”
“Routine patrol.”
“It wasn’t scheduled, damn it! I checked the logs.”
“They’re here, Commander. Our only choice is to abort.”
“No! We can’t. We’ll lose Evira if we do, maybe forever!�
�
“What then?”
Ben-Neser watched the soldiers climbing from their jeeps and stretching leisurely as they adjusted their automatic rifles to be within easy reach if needed.
“Approach them,” the colonel ordered Ari. “Approach them and identify yourself. Do it quietly. Don’t let anyone else realize what is going on. Tell them to get the fuck out.”
“They’re soldiers. They might question.”
“Not Mossad, they won’t question Mossad.” Ben-Neser swung his binoculars quickly back toward the the gift shop. “Go to them, Ari. Do as I say.”
Seconds later, Ari’s shape appeared from a centrally placed jewelry shop. He made his way down the crowded sidewalk in the direction of the soldiers who had only just begun to move away from their jeeps. He approached the officer wearing the beret of the team leader. Ari was all smiles, like a tourist might be, his shirt untucked, his walk loose-limbed. Ben-Neser could see they were a yard apart, Ari identifying himself and the officer seeming to heed him. A hand raised by the bereted leader into the air held up the progress of his team into the square.
That’s it, damn it, that’s it!
The bereted officer started to turn. Ben-Neser had actually relaxed, when the officer swung round and leveled into a combat stance with rifle angling straight for Ari. The brief reports sounded like hammers striking nails and Ari’s body was tossed backward, blood spouting from the punctures in his chest.
“My God,” was all Ben-Neser could mutter. In his hand he felt the sweat-soaked plastic of his walkie-talkie. Somewhere in his mind he recorded the sight of the men who could not have been soldiers at all fanning out through the crowded square that was suddenly bursting with panic. In that instant he forgot totally about Evira, thought only of Ari, a friend and soldier, who lay dead because of him and his damned obsession.
The walkie-talkie was at his lips now. He heard himself speaking into it, forming the words in the last instant before they emerged.
“They’re not soldiers! Take them!” he ordered.
“Shots!” Blaine shouted, lunging from his chair.