Exile: a novel (62 page)

Hana’s face turned somber. “Did you tell them this?”

“I couldn’t. Not after your father showed me his grandfather’s deed.”

“Then you did a kindness.” Suddenly, tears welled in Hana’s eyes. “I wish you could hold me, David. Just for a moment.”

But he could not. Nor, as much as he wished it, could he yet be sure she was innocent. Faced with a trial, he could not lose himself.

“I’m sorry, Hana. It’s become my job to free you, not love you.”

He clung to that as he left, Hana watching him through the glass.

They sat in his office a half hour after sunrise, drinking coffee while David outlined his tactical dilemma. “I’ve got two potential defenses,” he summarized. “The one I’d like to put on is a conspiracy involving Israelis, Hamas, and maybe Hana’s husband. But the judge won’t let me go there unless I come up with proof.

“The defense Marnie Sharpe hopes to stick me with is confined to arguing reasonable doubt: that Jefar may be lying or deluded; that the evidence against Hana was planted by someone else. The problem is that I can’t offer an alternative explanation that points to Hana’s innocence—or at least suggests a conspiracy so complicated that a juror inclined to skepticism might feel sufficient doubt.”

Castle flicked back her hair. “If you have to try the case Sharpe’s way, can you get the judge to bar Jefar’s testimony on hearsay grounds? It seems like his whole story depends on what Hassan told him.”

“
If
Judge Taylor keeps him off the stand,” David responded, “then Sharpe’s case collapses. I’ve got a shot at that. But it would take real guts on Taylor’s part to kick Hana loose without a trial.”

Castle pondered this. “If Jefar testifies,” she said at length, “and all Taylor lets you do is harp on reasonable doubt, your client’s in deep trouble.”

Though David had always known this, to hear it from an expert was depressing. “So far,” he told her, “the Israeli government won’t tell me what they know. My potential witnesses to a conspiracy are dead. Except in the
case of Muhammad Nasir, I can’t even claim to know who killed them. All I’ve got is questions without answers.”

Castle frowned at the quandary this presented, then asked, “I assume you want me to pull together a mock jury for you to present your case to, then focus-group their reactions. The question is, Which case?”

David finished his coffee, examining the grounds at the bottom of his cup. “The lousy one,” he answered. “Reasonable doubt. That’s the only defense I’m sure I’ve got.”

When David listened to his voice mail, there was a message from Zev Ernheit.

It was evening in Israel; David reached Zev in a noisy café in Tel Aviv, sharing dinner with his wife and several friends. “God knows who else is listening to this conversation,” Zev said over the chatter. “But let me find a quiet place on the sidewalk, so at least it won’t include the people in this room.”

David waited, listening as the background noise became the sounds of urban traffic. “So far,” Ernheit said in a softer voice, “I’ve found out nothing about this crime lab. But I do have something on Khalid’s visits to Jordan, though I can’t tell you where I got it. How does a side trip to Iran strike you?”

David stood. “When?”

“About three years ago. A Palestinian can’t fly from Israel to Tehran, but flying there from Amman is no problem.”

“How long was he there?”

“Two days. We don’t know what he did, or who he saw. But when he came back to the West Bank through Israeli border control, all his passport showed was a stamp from the Jordanians for reentry into Jordan. His entry into Iran wasn’t recorded.”

David considered several questions, then asked the obvious one. “Then how did they know Saeb was even there?”

“He told them. Flipping through his passport, one of our people noticed he’d entered Jordan twice, three days apart, with no record that he’d ever left. Khalid readily admitted that he’d been to Iran and said he had no idea why they’d failed to stamp his passport. He hadn’t noticed it, he claimed, but who knows the ways of bureaucrats.”

“Did he explain why he was there?”

“A whim. As a resident of the West Bank, he was prevented by the Israelis from traveling to Iran; as a professor of international relations, he wanted to see Iran for himself. I’m told he was pretty cheeky about it.”

“Did your intelligence people buy that?”

Ernheit laughed briefly. “Not entirely. But they could hardly call the
Iranian secret intelligence service. So all they could do was keep an eye on Khalid.

“To what end, I don’t know. Except that there’s no evidence of further trips to Iran. Of course, we don’t have the manpower to constantly watch every person who hates us, or hangs out with people who do.”

“On the later trips, do we know what he did in Amman besides see a doctor?”

“My anonymous friends may,” Ernheit said, “but they’re not saying. Whatever he did, no one arrested him for it. Our government even let him travel to America.”

David pondered this. “I assume the Iranians are active in Amman.”

“Of course,” Ernheit answered. “As they are in many places.”

“Thanks, Zev. Go back and enjoy dinner.”

That afternoon, David and Bryce Martel walked on Baker Beach. It was unseasonably warm, even for October, and families and couples strolled along the sand or waded into the chill, lapping surf in shorts or rolled-up jeans. Ahead, a young couple tossed a Frisbee for a retriever, who snatched it from the waves, shaking the water out of his fur as his owners meandered toward the Golden Gate Bridge, its span bright orange in the distance.

“Would the Iranians assassinate Ben-Aron?” Bryce asked rhetorically. “You know about their operation against Israelis in Argentina. But few people know that, several years ago, we uncovered evidence that the Iranian secret intelligence service was plotting to kill the director of our NSA.”

“That takes a lot of nerve.”

“Our man had
hit
a nerve by strongly opposing Iran’s nuclear program. For a while the director worked in an underground location with Secret Service protection.” Martel stopped to peel off his windbreaker, stretching his arms as he did. “I’m getting stiffer every day—rigor mortis by degrees. Old age seems to be God’s way of preparing us to die.”

David shoved his hands in his pockets. “If the Iranians wanted to kill our NSA director, why not Ben-Aron?”

In silence, they followed the cavorting dog along the water’s edge. “Iran has a history of playing geopolitics,” Martel responded after a time. “Iran’s main connection has been to Islamic Jihad. But it has links to Hamas. And, like Hamas, Iran despises Faras for talking peace with Ben-Aron.

“Given that, I can see the Iranians recruiting someone like Iyad Hassan even without the blessing of Hamas. And if the stakes involve developing nuclear weapons before anyone can stop them, they might take some pretty tall chances.”

“Suppose Iran lobbed a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv.”

Martel emitted a harsh laugh. “You’ve seen Israel. It’s a strip of land on the Mediterranean. One or two warheads would kill hundreds of thousands of Israelis in an instant—crushed in buildings, torn to shreds by flying glass, or just incinerated. Others would die in firestorms, or from radiation poisoning. Medical facilities would be overwhelmed, water supplies unusable, housing and shelter unavailable, transportation and communication decimated.

“Normal human society would cease; the balance of nature would unravel. Unburied corpses and untreated sewage would breed typhus, malaria, and encephalitis. Truly, the living would envy the dead. The fact that Israel might also have destroyed Iran would help them not at all.” Martel shook his head. “That’s why the Iranians desire such a weapon. All they need is to have it, and no one will dare fool with them. They can dominate the Middle East, working to eliminate Israel by less dramatic means. Including an Islamic Palestine.”

David stopped walking, struck by how this narrative made Hana seem so small, a bit player in a ruthless game of nuclear politics. “And Saeb?” he asked.

“Might be an Iranian asset. Do you have any proof of that?”

“None. But let’s assume further that Saeb recruited Hassan, and Hassan recruited Jefar. Could the Iranians come up with the explosives, uniforms, motorcycles, passports, et cetera they needed in America?”

“Yes. Aside from the ringers in their mission at the U.N., they’ve got a network of Iranian émigrés. Iran could even work through Hamas sleepers in places like Berkeley. The Iranians would give their individual assets a piece of the project, none grasping what the pieces added up to. Even Hassan may not have known who he was working for. No one would, except a select few people in Tehran.”

“That leaves Israel. What’s Iran’s capacity there?”

“It has agents in place, mostly Arabs. But your thesis requires a connection between Iranian agents and Lev or Markis.” Martel resumed walking. “I have no problem believing that they shared a common objective: the death of Ben-Aron. But it’s like Mozart meeting Genghis Khan for drinks. They both might like scotch, but who brings them together?

“We’ve been talking for an hour, David. No doubt everything I’ve told you is enthralling. But from where you sit, spinning theories is a waste of time. You’re a lawyer, and lawyers face the impediment of proof.”

Three days later, a group of strangers drove home Martel’s last point.

In David’s conference room, twelve people recruited by Ellen Castle— mainly students and retirees—gathered to consider the case for, and against, Hana Arif. They listened to opening statements delivered by David’s associate, Angel Garriques, in the role of Marnie Sharpe, and David on behalf of Hana; parsed the expected testimony, particularly that of Ibrahim Jefar; and then heard Angel’s summation and David’s pointed response, dissecting the evidence against Hana. Two hours later, they returned a guilty verdict.

Afterward, David interviewed the jurors. The young woman selected as the foreman, a graduate student whose sympathies David had expected, crystallized the reasons. “You’re implying that someone framed your client,” she told David. “But you can’t give us a person, or even a reason why. If
you
don’t know, who does?”

He was as prepared as he could be. But this did not give him peace, or sleep. At length he put on a sweater and windbreaker and, leaving his flat, walked to the marina and then on the path along the bay, wisps of fog dampening his face, the only sound the deep susurrus of the surf. To experience such dark and solitude was strange, but no more so than to absorb how much his life had changed. When he chose a place to sit, it was on the bench where, months ago, Harold Shorr had implored him not to defend the woman who, thirteen years ago, he had loved more than anyone, before or since.

The memory of his conversation with Harold tugged at him; even more acutely than before, David realized that he had also loved Carole’s father and, in the deep way that one loves comfort and generosity and the sense of being at home, Carole herself. And now at last he understood why their identity as Jews was so defining. Israel and Palestine had taught him that.

Since his return, he had been immersed in the task before him: preparing for a trial that, if he did not succeed in stopping it, could cost Hana Arif her life. But he could no longer deny the profound effect of his trip to the Middle East, and all that he had perceived. And so for an hour, observing the streaks of moonlight on an obsidian bay, he allowed his soul to catch up with his body.

The stakes were not just Hana’s life or freedom but the future of a girl whose life Hana seemed to value more than her own. The unreasoning love of a parent for a child had revealed itself to David; the young woman he
had loved at Harvard had not yet known how this would feel. This emotion, too, David had begun to comprehend—partly because of Saeb, but also because he had come to care about Munira. All this made Hana’s trial different from any other.

And what of Hana herself? Were she with him now, he might have said much more to her. That he wondered whether she felt for him because the sadness in her life created a space for memories. That were it not for the trial, he might give her the affection she seemed to need, and find out how that felt to both of them. That when he looked at her, he still felt the deep sense, however irrational, that there were feelings between them that transcended where they came from. But now he had seen where she had come from, and he could say none of those things. And as her lawyer, he could not so much as touch her. He could not yet be certain that she was innocent of killing Amos Ben-Aron.

David felt a surge of anger. He hated the choices he had forced himself to make: to be so entwined with Carole and her father and then have their relations so brutally severed was far more painful, he understood, than the loss of his career in politics. Since law school, he had been determined to protect himself from hurt. But he had hurt himself nonetheless; he had made himself into a more reflective, more deliberate version of his father. Hana had not done this to him—he had done it to himself.