Fuse of Armageddon (25 page)

Guest:
Report to me the gun shipment into Gaza. Was the operation a success?


Host:
Total casualties.


The Mossad was so easy to manipulate. Imagine that—helping Safady set up gun battles that killed his tribal rivals in Gaza. When he was ready, Safady would emerge to lead all of Palestine, revered like Arafat but feared like the Red Prince at Munich. The only difference was that Safady would become a figurehead for the entire Muslim world.

Safady responded with a change of direction in the chat room conversation.

Guest:
It is not enough that you have placed Quinn as negotiator. I will demand that he be sent into Gaza. Confirm that you understand and will make adequate preparations.


Host:
Confirmed. All you need to do is ask, and we will permit it.


Safady was tempted to spend more time in the chat room to debase the Mossad mole. But there were more immediate and more satisfying actions to be accomplished. Safady cut off the power to his laptop without acknowledging the confirmation or bothering to make arrangements for their next communication. He stood, planning out the next few minutes.

Next he needed one of the orphans.

An image sprang to his mind. Yes, he thought, it would not be difficult to choose.

CCTI Headquarters, Tel Aviv • 10:26 GMT


“Let me read off a list of terrorists who were executed,” Kate said. “The ones on a list as belonging to Red September.”

Quinn was on his back on the leather couch, staring at the ceiling. He wanted sleep, but caffeine and adrenaline were pounding him with equal force, and he knew it would be useless to try. He’d been thinking about Roz, wondering how and why Roz had disappeared and who had taken him, when Kate had pulled up a chair to sit beside him.

“Don’t bother,” he said. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. “You’ll mangle the pronunciations.”

“An American prosecutor probably would too,” she answered. “But I don’t think a jury would find that relevant. Not when they discover that all those men were murdered after you tracked them down. If you’re ever going to persuade a jury you didn’t kill them, first you need to persuade me.”

“I didn’t kill them,” he said.

“Then tell me what happened in Vegas. You were there. You can’t deny you were there.”

“Are you going to believe me?”

“I’ll find a way to either confirm or disprove whatever you tell me. But I’d be hoping the whole time to find out you’re telling the truth. Give me something I can go on.”

“And here I’d almost forgotten that you were guarding me with the sole purpose of taking me back to the U.S. for a trial and execution. Funny how worrying about the lives of thirty other terrified people seems more important right now. Instead, you’re right in the middle of cop work.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on his arm. It startled him, but he didn’t pull away. “I think I understand.”

Quinn closed his eyes. He couldn’t help a small smile. “Impressive,” he said. Her hand was still there. It had been how long since he’d experienced even a small intimacy like this? He didn’t want it to end, but at Acco Harbor, she’d already fooled him once.

“Impressive?” she repeated.

“The soft touch. Your empathy sounds real enough to encourage a person to share. But by not specifying what it is you understand, you’re leaving the door open to learn the unexpected. Like pulling on a string to see what unravels.”

She pulled her hand away. “I’m not that calculating.”

“Right. Yesterday, how clear was it that you were inviting me to dinner to ask me questions about murder and extradition?”

“That
was
cop work,” she said. “Black-and-white. Good guy, bad guy. Me the good guy.”

“And catch the bad guy by any method possible.”

“Back in Vegas, you are the main suspect in a brutal murder. Back in Vegas, terrorist attacks and bombings are abstract. Just part of the daily media filler. Here it’s real. Somebody is holding thirty people and, for all we know, getting ready to kill them. Maybe I’m beginning to understand what would motivate a person to fight outside the law.”

“Make sure to write a letter to the editor of the local paper,” Quinn said. “Help others develop sympathy too.”

“Classic male tactic,” she said. “Avoidance and pretend cynicism, with just enough sarcasm to bully a woman into silence.”

“I doubt you bully easy, but I can hope.”

“What I’m trying to say is that suddenly this whole situation is not so black-and-white to me. I like black-and-white. Gray is not good in my job. Gray makes decisions difficult. Black-and-white is much easier.”

“What a shame, living in a world without color.”

“Black-and-white to me is that it’s against the law to murder someone, even if the motives can be justified. Being here, so close to what’s happening, is showing me the gray. Maybe I can understand why a man would cold-bloodedly track down other men and eliminate them one by one.”

Quinn swung his legs off the couch and sat up. They faced each other, within reaching distance of one another. It made him aware of her attractiveness all over again.

“What I’m saying,” she continued, “is regardless of the evidence against you, it might not matter if you could get a jury to fully understand how this fanaticism has no regard for the destruction of lives, how a man would want to revenge the death of his wife and daughter against this fanaticism.”

“You’re suggesting justification for murder is all a jury would need to hear,” Quinn said, his throat so tight he could hardly speak above a whisper. “Convince them that revenge is not black-and-white but gray? Even for a man who says his faith in Jesus as a man of love is the only thing keeping him together? That revenge is something Jesus would applaud?”

She nodded.

He needed to take a breath, to hold back the rush of horror and pain and sadness that came with the memories. Time hadn’t healed his wounds, only buried them, and when something brought them back to the surface, the vividness was like a blow.

“You have no idea,” he said. “People would say, ‘I’m so sorry for you. We know what you must be going through. You’re in our prayers.’ Sympathy, yes; prayers, yes; but don’t dare tell me that you know what it must be like. Not even a parent who has lost a child can explain it well enough to another parent who has lost a child. It is so searingly devastating that nothing—absolutely nothing—can take away that pain.”

Kate put her hands together in her lap and had the sense not to nod as if she understood.

“Revenge?” Quinn said. “If you don’t understand the pain of losing a child, you can believe that looking for revenge is a way to deal with it. But if you did understand—which you can’t—you’d know how futile revenge is as a reason to stay alive and hang on through the pain to track them down. How about hope instead, that as each terrorist is arrested, it means one less who can harm another child. One less animal who can put another mother or father into a place of hell that no other human can understand.”

Quinn’s need for catharsis ended in that rush of words.

“So,” Kate said after a long silence, “gray is discovering maybe the law needs to be set aside if it saves innocent lives.”

“You discover what you need to,” Quinn said. “I’ve already discovered more than what I want.”

It hurt just talking about how much it hurt. He could feel his little girl’s arms around his neck as if he’d just set her down and she’d just giggled and run from the office. And in the same moment, he could hear the wailing of sirens and smell the cordite and the burned wreckage that had torn the breath from his lungs as he wandered through the devastation of the exploded bus.

Abruptly Quinn stood and walked out of the office and into the kitchen. Kate didn’t follow.

Quinn was staring sightlessly at the far wall, waiting for his frustration to dissolve, when the door to the kitchen area opened. He didn’t turn.

“Quinn.”

It was Hamer.

“Yeah.” Quinn’s voice was flat.

“We found the hard drive in that Jerusalem apartment,” Hamer said. “It was a gold mine. We’ve located Safady and the Americans.”

“You don’t look happy about it.”

“It’s about to become a hostage situation.”

“I thought we were going to keep it from becoming a hostage situation for as long as possible.”

“IDF won’t have a choice,” Hamer said. “Someone leaked it already. CNN is updating the entire world on this.”

22

Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip • 10:27 GMT


Safady marched toward Jonathan Silver, flanked by a half dozen Palestinian men carrying machine guns. The children playing around the beds looked up, then continued playing. Silver, sitting on the edge of his own bed, remained in place.

“Last night,” Safady said, “did I make it clear that there would be consequences if anyone tried to escape?”

Silver nodded. His focus was on Safady’s hands. The Black Prince carried a grenade in his right hand, duct tape in his left.

“You heard those shots?” Safady snarled.

Silver closed his eyes and nodded again. Klein and Williams. He didn’t need to be told. His gut told him that they’d failed.

“Two of your men were just executed. One was caught trying to help the other through a window.” Safady didn’t wait for a response. He pointed at Silver. Two of the Palestinian men stepped forward. One jabbed the barrel of his machine gun in Silver’s belly.

All noise ended in the dorm. The children became still.

“Stand,” Safady ordered Silver. “Remove your shirt.”

“You can’t shoot me,” Silver said, fighting the urge to blubber. “I didn’t tell them to try it. I’m not responsible.”

Safady tucked the roll of duct tape under his opposite arm to give himself a free hand. He reached over the machine gun still pushed against Silver’s belly and pinched Silver’s nostrils shut. “You’ve forgotten that I control the air you breathe. Stand. Strip to your waist. Or the tape will go around your face instead of your chest.”

Silver found the strength to stand. With trembling arms, he lifted his shirt over his head. He was acutely aware of his nakedness. Although he still wore pants and shoes, he was ashamed of his flab and his wrinkled, old skin, especially with the eyes of the children and of all the other Americans on him.

“Turn around,” Safady said.

Was this how it would happen? A bullet in the back of the skull?

Silver turned. He forced himself to find some pride. A few tears escaped his eyes, but he managed to keep any sound from escaping.

Dear God,
he prayed silently, hoping he’d be given enough time to finish his prayer,
please take me home to You. Please forgive all the wrongs I have done. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Would he even hear the sound, he wondered. Feel the impact of the bullet against his skull? Or would he die without realizing it?

The sensation he felt next was of something cold against his spine, halfway up his back. Something round. It took a moment to comprehend.

It was the grenade.

There was a ripping sound. Duct tape, peeled back from the roll, pressed against his skin. There was movement at his chest. Silver glanced down and saw a pair of hands. Again, another flash of comprehension. Safady was taping the grenade to his back!

Safady was thorough. He wrapped the tape four times around Silver, saying nothing. Then he spun Silver around again.

One of Safady’s men carried a spool of thin cable and a pair of pliers.

Safady gave a quick order in Arabic. The man knelt at the side of the bunk bed and wrapped one end of the cable around one of the bed’s support struts. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a small piece of metal, obviously designed to be crimped. He used the pliers to attach the loose end to the main strand of the cable and crimped the loop together.

“Are you starting to understand?” Safady asked Silver.

“You are going to use the cable to tie me to the bunk.”

“No,” Safady said. His smiled showed cold pleasure. “The end that you see around the bed cannot be removed, of course. The loop at the other end you won’t be able to see, but trust me, it will be equally impossible to pull apart.”

Safady placed a hand on Silver’s shoulder and spun him around one more time. “Hold still,” he warned. “This is the delicate part. You see, I’m attaching the end of this cable to the pin on the grenade strapped to your back.”

Silver froze and held his breath.

“Ah. I can see that you are beginning to understand the concept.” Safady’s fingers brushed against Silver’s back repeatedly as he hooked the cable to the grenade’s pin. “Don’t move yet.” He wrapped one more round of tape around Silver’s chest and back, securing the grenade, then stepped back and admired his work.

He gave a couple of slight nods with a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “Think of it as a leash. If you pull too hard or try to go any farther than the length of the cable, you’ll pull the pin loose. That will give you about five seconds until the grenade blows you apart.”

“Wait,” Silver croaked. “When I have to go to the bathroom . . . ?”

“Interesting, don’t you think? A man of your wealth, power, and means, yet in the end, it always comes down to the elemental human needs.”

Safady pulled on the blanket that covered the mattress. “These men are going to make sure every one of you is wired like this. We’re going to nail these blankets to the beds—” he tapped the top of the frame—“and tent each of you in place. No communications. If we hear noise, we shoot first, no questions asked.”

“Bathroom.” Silver already felt pressure on his bladder.

“Every hour the child that is assigned to you will appear with a plastic bucket. If you can’t wait that long, too bad.”