Ari cringed, waiting for the first blow to come. But it never did. Instead Fuad reached over and touched his right hand, placing something in it. Ari couldn’t believe what his fingers told him was true. Fuad had slipped him a razor blade!
“This is all I can do. I’m sorry I can’t help you escape, but I would be held responsible,” Fuad whispered in Hebrew, instead of the French he began the conversation with.
And suddenly all the tumblers fell into place. For weeks it was as if he had been trying to open a twenty-combination lock with the first nineteen digits. Now he saw that the missing number had always been there, out of reach. One by one the people in Ari’s life passed before him. The Colonel, phlegmatic and unrevealing, who’d been even vaguer than usual. Michelle, who wanted to go away that particular weekend. Kim, who’d asked too many questions. Barkai, who never showed. Al-Alazar, who seemed to be warm and sympathetic but was as ruthless as all of them. After twenty-nine years in the Service this is what it had come to: his only value was as a decoy.
He realized now how al-Alazar had known so much about his relationship with Kim. Fuad had told him. Fuad was Operative 66. Ari had been sent to Damascus for only one reason: to create the illusion that al-Alazar was the Israeli the Syrian High Command sought so desperately. The Parliament member was an Israeli spy, but one of much lesser importance. Ari had been sacrificed openly to protect Fuad, to assure all concerned that they had eliminated the alien agent operating in their midst.
“What about Dov?” he asked, feeling the weight of the razor blade in his hand.
“His suffering is over. He died last night.”
Tears rose in Ari’s eyes.
“I must go now,” Fuad said rising. “I can’t risk being seen here.” He moved through the darkness, then stopped. Bowing his head and speaking softly he began to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“Yitgadal,
Veyitkaddash,
Shemay rabbah, bealmah…”
When he’d finished he closed the heavy door behind him.
An all-pervasive silence settled over the cell.
With firm strokes Ari slit his wrists. In detached fascination he watched his blood form two small pools in the cold dirt. A rush of memories overwhelmed him; faces and voices appeared and vanished, whenever he tried to hold them they faded into the mist in his mind. Gradually his head grew heavy and he felt tired, very tired. He shut his eyes and borne by a wave of hope, he drifted, back over the dreams of what could have been, back into the inescapable past.
◆◆◆
The following morning reprisals against the children’s relatives began in Damascus.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOWARD KAPLAN, a native of Los Angeles, has lived in Israel and traveled extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. At the age of 21, while attending school in Jerusalem, he was sent on a mission into the Soviet Union to smuggle out a dissident’s manuscript on microfilm. His first trip was a success. On his second trip to the Soviet Union, he was arrested in Khartiv in the Ukraine and interrogated for two days there and two days in Moscow, before being released. He holds a BA in Middle East History from UC Berkeley and an MA in the Philosophy of Education from UCLA. He is the author of four novels.
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