The Icarus Agenda (24 page)

“I refuse to be used as a geopolitical tool!” Khalehla’s mother had exclaimed, laughing.

“Actually, my dear, everything between us was arranged by our devious parents here. Have you any idea how they’ve profited from our alliance?”

“The only profit I’ve ever seen is the lovely young lady who’s my granddaughter,” said the banker.

“She’s off to America, my friend,” said the exporter. “Your profits may dwindle.”

“How does it feel, darling? Quite an adventure for you, I’d think.”

“It’s hardly the first time, Grandmother. We’ve visited you and Grandfather a lot, and I’ve been to quite a few cities.”

“It will be different now, dear.” Khalehla forgot who had said those words, but they were the beginning of one of the strangest chapters of her life. “You’ll be living there,” added whoever it was.

“I can’t wait. Everyone’s so friendly, you feel so wanted, so liked.”

Once again those around the table looked at one another. It was the banker who had broken the silence. “You may not always feel that way,” he said quietly. “There will be times when you’re not wanted, not liked, and it will confuse you, certainly hurt you.”

“That’s hard to believe, Grandfather,” said an ebullient young girl Khalehla only vaguely remembered.

The Californian had briefly looked at his son-in-law, his eyes pained. “As I think back, it’s hard for me to believe it, too. Don’t ever forget, young lady, if problems arise or if things become difficult, pick up the phone and I’ll be on the next plane.”

“Oh, Grandfather, I can’t imagine doing that.”

And she hadn’t, although there were times when she came close, only pride and what strength she could summon stopping her.
Shvartzeh Arviyah!
… “Nigger-Arab!” was her first introduction to one-on-one hatred. Not the blind, irrational hatred of mobs running amok in the streets, brandishing placards and crudely made signs, cursing an unseen enemy far away across distant borders, but of young people like herself, in a pluralistic
community of learning, sharing classrooms and cafeterias, where the worth of the individual was paramount, from entrance through constant evaluation to graduation. One contributed to the whole, but as
himself
or
herself
, not as an institutional robot except perhaps on the playing fields, and even there individual performance was recognized, often more so in defeat, touchingly more so.

Yet for so long she had not been an individual; she had lost
herself
. That had been eradicated, transferred to an abstract, insidious racial collective called
Arab
. Dirty Arab, devious Arab, murderous Arab—Arab, Arab,
Arab
—until she couldn’t stand it any longer! She stayed by herself in her room, turning down offers from dormitory acquaintances to visit the collegiate drinking halls; twice had been enough.

The first should have been enough. She had gone to the ladies’ room only to find it blocked by two male students; they were Jewish students, to be sure, but they were also
American
students.

“Thought you Arabs didn’t drink!” shouted the drunken young man on her left.

“It’s a choice one makes,” she had replied.

“I’m told you
Arviyahh
piss on the floor of your tents!” cried the other, leering.

“You were misinformed. We’re quite fastidious. May I please go inside—”

“Not here, Arab. We don’t know what you’d leave on the toilet seat and we have a couple of
yehudiyah
with us. Got the message,
Arab
?”

The breaking point, however, came at the end of her second semester. She had done well in a course taught by a renowned Jewish professor, well enough to have been singled out by the sought-after teacher as the student he deemed to have achieved the most. The prize, an annual event in his class, was a personally inscribed copy of one of his works. Many of her classmates, Jews and non-Jews alike, had come around to congratulate her, but when she left the building three others in stocking masks had stopped her on a wooded path back to her dormitory.

“What did you do?” one asked. “Threaten to blow his house up?”

“Maybe knife his kids with a sharp Arab dagger?”

“Hell, no! She’d call in Arafat!”

“We’re going to teach you a lesson,
Shvartzeh Arviyah
!”

“If the book means so much to you,
take
it!”

“No, Arab,
you
take it.”

She had been raped. “This is for Munich!” “This for the children in the Golan kibbutz!” “This for my cousin on the beaches of Ashdod, where you bastards
killed
him!” There had been no sexual gratification for the attackers, only the fury of inflicting punishment on the
Arab
.

She had half crawled, half stumbled back toward her dormitory when a very important person came into her life. One Roberta Aldridge, the inestimable Bobbie Aldridge, the iconoclastic daughter of the New England Aldridges.

“
Scum!
” she had screamed into the trees of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“You must never
tell
!” pleaded the young Egyptian girl. “You don’t
understand
!”

“Don’t you worry about that, honey. In Boston we have a phrase that means the same thing from Southie to Beacon Hill. ‘Them that gives
gets
!’ And those motherfuckers will
get
, take my word!”

“
No!
They’ll come after me—they won’t understand, either! I don’t hate Jews … my dearest friend since childhood is the daughter of a rabbi, one of my father’s closest colleagues. I
don’t
hate Jews. They’ll say I do because to them I’m just a dirty Arab, but I don’t! My family’s not like that. We don’t hate.”

“Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything about Jews, you did. I said ‘motherfuckers,’ which is an all-inclusive term, so to speak.”

“It’s finished here. I’m finished. I’ll leave.”

“The hell you will! You’re seeing my doctor, who’d better know his marbles, and then you move in with me.
Christ
, I haven’t had a cause in almost two years!”

Praise God and Allah, and all those other deities above. I have a friend. And somehow, within the pain and the hatred of those days, an idea was born that grew into a commitment. An eighteen-year-old girl knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

The telephone rang. The past was finished,
over
, the present
was
everything! She ran to the bedside phone, yanked it out of its cradle. “
Yes?
”

“He’s here.”

“
Where?
”

“The embassy.”

“Oh, my
God
! What’s happening? What’s he doing?”

“He’s with two others—”

“There are three, not
four
?”

“We have only seen three. One is at the gate among the beggars. He’s been talking to the terrorists inside.”

“The
American
! Where is
he
?”

“With the third man. The two of them stay in the shadows; only the first man shows himself. He is the one who makes the decisions, not the American.”

“What do you mean?”

“We think he’s making arrangements for them to go inside.”

“
No!
” screamed Khalehla. “They can’t—
he
can’t, he
mustn’t
! Stop them, stop
him
!”

“Such orders should come from the palace, madame—”

“Such orders come from
me
! You’ve been
told
! The prisoner compound was one thing, but not the embassy,
never
the embassy, not for
him
! Go out and take them, stop them, kill them if you have to! Kill
him
!”

“
Hurry!
” cried the robed Arab running to his colleague in the front of the boarded-up restaurant and cracking the bolt of his machine gun into the firing position. “Our orders are to take them now, stop them, stop the American. Kill him, if we must.”

“
Kill
him?” asked the astonished official from the palace.

“Those are the orders.
Kill
him!”

“The orders have come too late. They’re gone.”

The figure in the dark sterile room touched the letters of the keyboard with angry precision.

I’ve broken the Langley access codes and it’s madness! Not the CIA, for the liaison is withholding nothing. Instead, the insanity is with the subject. He has gone into the embassy! He can’t survive. He’ll be found out—at the toilet, at a meal with or without utensils, with a single reaction to a phrase. He’s been away too long! I’ve factored in every possibility and my appliances offer little hope. Perhaps my appliances and I were too quick to render judgment. Perhaps our national messiah is no more than a fool, but then all messiahs have been considered fools and idiots until proven otherwise. That is my hope, my prayer.

The three escaped prisoners crawled in the darkness up through the ancient, moss-laden sewer line to a gridded opening on the stone floor of the embassy’s east courtyard. Struggling, their hands and feet scraped and bloodied, they emerged into the dazzling sunlight only to be met by a scene Evan Kendrick wished with all his being had remained in darkness. Sixty or more hostages had been removed from the roof to the courtyard for their meager morning food and ablutions. A latrine consisted of wooden planks with circular holes above planter boxes, the men separated from the women by a large transparent screen ripped from one of the embassy’s windows. The degradation was complete in that the guards, male and female, walked back and forth in front of the hostages, male and female, laughing and making loud jokes about the functional difficulties their captives were experiencing. The toilet paper, tauntingly held out beyond the reach of trembling hands before it was finally delivered, consisted of printouts from the embassy’s computers.

Across the way, in full view of the frightened, humiliated people at the planks, the hostages had formed a line leading to three long, narrow tables with rows of metal plates holding dry bread and small wedges of questionable cheese. Spaced between were filthy pitchers filled with a grayish-white liquid, presumably diluted goat’s milk, which was poured sparingly into the prisoners’ wooden bowls by a group of armed terrorists behind the tables. Every now and then a hostage was refused a plate or a ladleful of milk; pleading was futile; it resulted in a slap or a fist or a ladle in the face when the cries were too loud.

Suddenly, as Kendrick’s eyes were still adjusting to the harsh light a young prisoner, a boy of no more than fourteen or fifteen, tears streaming down his face, his features contorted, screamed in defiance. “You lousy
bastard
! My mother’s sick! She keeps throwing up from this crap! Give her something decent, you sons of bitches—”

The boy’s words were cut short by the barrel of a rifle across his face, tearing his left cheek. Instead of subduing the youngster, the blow infuriated him. He lunged across the table, grabbing
the shirt of the man with the rifle, tearing it off his chest, sending metal plates and pitchers crashing down from the table. In seconds, the terrorists were on him, pulling him away from the bearded man he was wrestling to the ground, pummeling him with rifle butts and kicking his writhing body on the courtyard stone. Several other male hostages, their anger and courage aroused by the boy’s action, rushed forward shouting with weak, hoarse voices, their arms flailing pathetically against their arrogant, far stronger enemies. What followed was a brutal suppression of the minirevolt. As the hostages fell they were beaten unconscious and kicked like carcasses being thumped and processed in a slaughterhouse.

“
Animals!
” roared an old man, holding his trousers and walking unsteadily forward from the planks, his resolve and dignity intact. “
Arab
animals! Arab
savages
! Have none of you a shred of civilized decency? Does beating to death weak defenseless men make you heroes of
Islam
? If so, take me and issue yourselves more medals, but in the name of God, stop what you’re
doing
!”

“Whose
God
?” shouted a terrorist over the body of the unconscious boy. “A Christian Jesus, whose followers arm our enemies so they can massacre our children with bombs and cannons? Or a wandering Messiah, whose people steal our lands and kill our fathers and mothers? Get your Gods straight!”

“
Enough!
” commanded Azra, striding rapidly forward. Kendrick followed, unable to control himself, thinking that moments before he might have grabbed the MAC-10 weapon off Blue’s shoulder and fired into the terrorists. Standing above the bloodied youngster, Azra continued, his voice casual. “The lesson’s been taught; don’t overteach it or you’ll numb those you want to instruct. Take these people down to the infirmary, to the hostage doctor … and find the boy’s mother. Bring her there also and get her a meal.”

“
Why
, Azra?” protested the Palestinian. “No such consideration was shown
my
mother! She was—”

“
Nor
to mine,” broke in Blue firmly, stopping the man. “And look at us now. Take this child down and let him stay with his mother. Have someone speak to them about overzealousness and pretend to care.”

Kendrick watched in revulsion while the limp, bleeding bodies were carried away. “You did the right thing,” he said to Azra in English, his words coldly noncommittal, talking like a technician. “One doesn’t always care to, but one has to know when to stop.”

The new prince of terrorists studied Evan through opaque eyes. “I meant what I said. Look at us now. The death of our own makes us different. One day we’re children, the next we are grown up, no matter the years, and we are experts at death, for the memories never leave us.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t, Amal Bahrudi. Yours is an ideological war. For you death is a political act. You are a passionate believer, I have no doubt—but still what you believe is politics. That’s not my war. I have no ideology but survival, so that I can extract death for death—and still survive.”