The Last Refuge (8 page)

Meir kept his face blank. It had been a while but he could understand the words.

“It will be done.” Then a click as he shut the phone.

Meir opened his eyes again.

“Evin?” asked the doctor.

The man behind him said nothing.

Evin.
The word sent a small wave of dread through his body. It was the most notorious prison in Iran. They had many names for it. The “torture chamber” was the one he remembered.

Meir shut his eyes. He tried to put those thoughts out of his mind. The dark thoughts. This was how they said it started, dark, uneven, bitter thoughts, when you realized that you were a prisoner. That you would almost certainly be tortured.

Under his lids, he felt tears, which he struggled to keep away. He had to stay strong now.

“Whatever you’re thinking, Commander, it’s wrong,” he said, coughing. “Whatever assumptions you have about where you’re going, or what we are going to do to you, I can assure you you are wrong. You are about to experience hell. I know you have been trained in torture. In pharmaceuticals. I know that you know that torture always, in the end, wins out. But torture is only part of what is coming. The part that you don’t yet understand is what it feels like to be the sword that slays your own people. That is what you are to become, Kohl. The symbol of Israel’s defeat. How do you think your fellow Jews will feel when we parade you in front of them, shackled like a dog?”

Meir let the words wash over him then. He let the man’s hatred take him over, like a sickness. He remained blank. Cold and blank as stone. For Meir knew that his strength in the coming hours would have to come from this wellspring of hatred. He would have to welcome it, draw energy from it. They could parade him in front of the world. Torture him. But if he could remain cold, unaffected, dignified, then he would win.

Meir let the thought of Israel, his country, come to him. He pictured the faces of his Shayetet unit, and the thought of the love and sacrifice of his fellow soldiers. He pictured his father, maimed permanently on the battlefield fighting in the Six Day War. He thought of all of the Israeli children who had lost their fathers, and all of the mothers who had lost their sons. He was not alone now. He let the strength of the Israeli soldiers who were still out there fighting forge like steel around him.

After what seemed like hours later, Meir felt the ambulance slow down. He heard the sound of a gate creaking open. There were voices, someone speaking with the ambulance driver, then laughter.

After the checkpoint, they drove farther on, slowly now. Then they came to a stop and the back doors of the ambulance opened.

Meir looked up. He saw no less than a dozen soldiers, standing in a loose semicircle behind the ambulance doors. Two soldiers reached for the steel frame of the gurney and pulled it out. Joined by two more men, they lifted him from the back of the van.

It was nighttime. He glanced up and could see stars. To the right, he spied a yellow sliver of moon. The soldiers stared at him like fishermen staring at a large tuna, dangling from a hook above the dock. From the back, a short man, dressed in a suit jacket, no tie, stepped through the crowd, a maniacal smile on his face. Meir recognized him immediately. The man stepped forward, a large grin painted across his lips. Photographs did not do justice to the man; he was far uglier in person than Meir could believe.

“I had to see it for myself,” said Mahmoud Nava, Iran’s president. “I can’t believe it. Welcome to Iran, son.”

Meir remained silent.

“Would you like something?” asked Nava. “Some water? Some food. Yes, yes, they will feed you. You have had a long flight. Would that be good?”

Meir said nothing.

Nava nodded, smiled, turned to the gathered soldiers.

“Ah, yes, I see,” said Nava. “Tough guy. Well, that is fine. This is not about you, Kohl. This is about your country. We will endeavor to treat you as well as can be expected, as long as you do what we say. We are not intent on hurting you. We are, however, determined to hurt your fellow countrymen. Do you see? Ah, yes, you will understand soon enough.”

Nava turned, walked back through the semicircle to a black sedan that was waiting.

They unstrapped Meir from the gurney. He collapsed, his legs having been immobile so long they had become numb, but a pair of soldiers caught him before he hit the ground, lifting him by the arms, which they cuffed tightly behind his back. They left the shackles around his ankles.

“Come,” said one of the soldiers, motioning toward a concrete building.

Meir walked, shackled, taking tiny steps, just inches with each step, slowly toward a door. Two soldiers, one at each side, guided him, holding his arms at the biceps behind his back.

He entered a hallway. Fluorescent lights overhead allowed him to see, for the first time, traces of blood on his shirt and khakis.

He moved down the hallway and entered a large, windowless room. A rectangular wooden table sat in the middle of the room. Two chairs, one on each side, faced each other.

The soldiers moved him to one of the chairs. They chained him tightly around his waist to the chair.

Meir sat for more than an hour in silence, alone, under the bright fluorescent lights. At some point, a young soldier brought him a bottle of water. The soldier held it to Meir’s mouth and he guzzled the entire bottle down in seconds. Then the soldier left.

A short time later, the door opened again. A tall, hulking man entered. The man was bald with a thin mustache, wearing a white button-down short-sleeve shirt and dark pants. He walked around Meir, examining him as if he were an animal at the zoo, before finally taking the chair across from him.

“Hello, Mr. Meir,” said the man in English with traces of a British accent. “My name is Moammar Achabar. I am your court-appointed attorney.”

Meir stared at Achabar with a blank look and said nothing.

“Now, let’s not have any pretense here,” continued Achabar. “We both know where this is going, and frankly I will be happy the day you’re found guilty. So don’t consider me a friend or even your advocate. I am an actor. And this is a play. And you are the star.”

Meir remained silent. Achabar removed a pack of cigarettes from his chest pocket. He lit a cigarette.

“Oh, yes,” continued Achabar, “in case you are wondering, it’s not a comedy. It’s a tragedy. At least, for you and your country. They will keep you at Evin for a period of time. I don’t know how long. You’ll be charged with crimes. What I’ve heard is that you’ll be charged with murder. You were involved with operations in the Strait of Hormuz, yes? Yes, of course you were. Well, there will be something to do with that.”

Achabar took several puffs of his cigarette, held it up as he did so, watching the orange cinders burn down toward the brown filter, then stubbed it out on the table. He lit another one.

“Whatever they charge you with, they will make an example of you,” said Achabar. “They’ll find you guilty. Will they execute you? It depends on the mood. I think it will hurt your country much more if you are rotting in a jail somewhere. So that is what I will advocate for. It’s funny, isn’t it? I want you to suffer, and yet they will say I’m your friend. That I fought for you. But really all I will be doing is trying to punish you in a way I believe is worse even than to be shot by a firing squad.”

Meir observed Achabar from his uncomfortable steel chair. He remembered, then, something his great-grandmother, Golda, had written, before she died. In one of her last letters, to a man named Farger, who had written expressing his concern as to what would happen to Israel when she died, she wrote:

Do not be concerned, for it is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is merely the end of the beginning.

The stark, brutal nature of the predicament Meir was now in struck him like a slap across the face. But he didn’t show it. Instead, he watched patiently, blankly, as his court-appointed attorney finished his third, then fourth cigarette.

For his part, Achabar smoked the last two cigarettes without speaking, slightly reclined, with one leg up on the wooden table, and a knowing grin on his lips.

“Would you like some food?” asked Achabar finally. He pulled his leg down from the table, stood up. “You must be hungry. Hold on.”

Achabar gestured to the one-way mirror at the side of the room. Soon, the door at the back of the room opened and two soldiers entered. One held a stainless-steel tray. He walked over to the table and placed it down. On top of it sat two apples, a large piece of bread, and a small bowl of nuts, along with a bottle of water.

The other soldier went behind Meir. He unlocked the cuff around Meir’s left wrist, pulled Meir’s wrist around in front of him, then refastened the cuffs, tightly, so that Meir’s wrists were touching in front of him. The soldiers pulled Meir’s chair forward, closer to the table, then turned and left the room.

Meir stared at the food for several minutes. He did nothing.

“I’m going to leave now, Kohl,” Achabar said. “Eat. You’re going to be here a while.”

Achabar turned and left the room. Meir stared at the tray for a few minutes. Finally, he reached out and picked up an apple. He was ravenous. He ate the apple quickly, swallowing large pieces that he had barely chewed. He then wolfed the bread down, then the nuts, then the other apple. He was surprised at how good the food tasted, even Iranian prison food, after not having eaten in such a long time.

Meir reached forward to the bottle of water. It was difficult to hold the wide bottle and unscrew the plastic cap. He struggled, then felt the bottle slipping from his shackled hands. He dropped the bottle. It bounced on the ground, then cracked. Water spilled on the ground.

After a few minutes, the door opened and two soldiers entered. One of them gathered the tray, then turned to leave the room while the other soldier reached down and picked up the dropped bottle of water. As he stood up, his head passed near Meir’s waist.

Meir lurched at the young soldier. He grabbed the man’s shirt at the starched collar with his manacled hands and pulled him down.

The soldier, caught off guard, screamed. He tried to push Meir away, but Meir held the shirt collar tight. The other soldier, near the door now, yelled and ran back to help.

Meir tried to move his fingers up toward the soldier’s neck. The soldier pulled back with all of his strength, but the Israeli commando was too powerful. Meir held firmly, clawing at the skin above the collar, clawing upward toward the man’s larynx.

Meir heard footsteps behind him, then felt a sharp blow to his left side, a boot—the other soldier kicking him with a steel-toed boot.

Meir pulled the soldier closer. His grasp was tightening. His fingers tore at the skin of the neck. The Iranian panicked as he tried desperately to pull backward and away from Meir’s hands. The soldier tried to yank Meir’s hands from his neck.

But Meir clawed his fingers like spider legs up the soldier’s neck. His fingers, with barely room between his hands, encircled the soldier’s neck in a tight grip.

More soldiers started pouring into the room, yelling and screaming at Meir to let go. The first soldier kicked relentlessly at Meir, his hard boot hitting Meir’s ribs and back. Meir absorbed the blows, as he had been trained to do. Compartmentalizing the pain, he focused on what he had to do. Another soldier soon joined him and Meir suddenly felt a sharp strike to the back of his head, the butt of a rifle.

But still he held firm.

“
Stop, Meir!
” came a scream, and he recognized the voice of Achabar, his attorney. “
Stop! You’ll kill him!
”

Meir was surrounded by a phalanx of men, then tackled. The steel chair cascaded over as at least four men grabbed him and wrenched him to the ground. They pulled at his head, yanked at his hands, tried to snap his fingers, which were locked around the soldier’s neck like a vise.

But it was too late. As Meir toppled over, he brought the soldier tumbling down with him. They landed under the scrum of Iranian soldiers. As they hit the ground, Meir turned his powerful hands counterclockwise in a sudden, violent motion. The soldier’s neck snapped, then he went limp, dead instantly on the hard, wet floor of the prison.

11

EITANIM GROVE

SAVYON, ISRAEL

Dewey was still dressed in the navy blue Brooks Brothers suit, now wrinkled from the overnight flight from New York. The cab dropped him off in a quiet, well-to-do residential neighborhood twenty minutes east of downtown Tel Aviv. It reminded him of Beverly Hills.

Dewey glanced both ways and crossed a tree-shrouded sidewalk to a large iron gate. He pushed the gate in; behind it, a hundred feet ahead, at the end of a fieldstone sidewalk, a simple, rambling single-level home spread to the left, a large garden to the right. At the front door, a short, middle-aged woman in a green sundress was standing. Her straight gray hair was brushed neatly back. She smiled at Dewey as he entered.

“Mrs. Meir?” asked Dewey as he walked to the woman and shook her hand. “I’m Dewey Andreas.”

“Please call me Vered.”

Dewey towered over Kohl Meir’s mother. She held his hand tightly.

“How was your flight?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Perhaps something to eat?”

“No, thank you,” said Dewey. “I grabbed a sandwich when I landed.”

“He’s waiting for you,” she said, nodding behind her. “The door.”

Dewey walked down the hallway, through the living room. At the back of the living room, a door stood closed. He knocked.

“Come in,” said a voice from inside the room.

Dewey entered a small room lined with bookshelves. Two windows looked out on a flower garden behind the house. In the middle of the room, a large man sat in a wheelchair; he was in his sixties with a thick head of black and gray hair; his features were chiseled, a sharp nose, broad forehead, tanned and ruddy. His deeply creased face looked as if it had been cut by winds over a lifetime outdoors.

“Hello, Dewey,” Tobias Meir said, his voice deep and gravelly. “Please, have a seat.”