The Solomon Effect (24 page)

Jaffa, Israel: Thursday 29 October 11:54
P.M.
local time

Leon Ginsburg lived in an ancient stone house on a narrow,
crooked street that dated back to the days when Jaffa was a prosperous Palestinian port surrounded by the vast orange groves that had made the city famous. The orange groves were mostly gone now, the few that were left disappearing fast beneath the runways of Ben-Gurion Airport and the creeping urbanization that had made Jaffa a virtual suburb of Tel Aviv.

It was nearly midnight by the time their taxi pulled up next to the house’s worn, shallow steps. A wrought-iron lamp set high on a coursed stone wall cast a pool of warm, golden light over a heavy, weathered door set into a corbelled arch. As Jax raised his fist to knock, the door swung inward to reveal a small, wizened man half lost in a bulky brown cardigan sweater, with thin white hair and wire-framed glasses he wore pushed down on the end of his bulbous nose.

“James! I wondered when you were going to get here.” His liver-spotted, bony hand closed on Jax’s sleeve, dragging him inside. “Come in, come in. You too, Miss Guinness.”

“James?”
whispered Tobie, following Jax up the steps.

“That’s right. James.” Leon Ginsburg closed the old door behind them and gave a soft laugh. “It’s his real name. James Aiden Xavier Alexander.”

“There are only two people in the world who call me James,” said Jax, slinging an affectionate arm around the old man’s shoulders. “My mother, and Leon.”

The old man huffed another laugh and ushered them down a narrow corridor. “I was Jax’s grandfather for two years, you know. Did he tell you?”

The corridor erupted suddenly into a leafy courtyard surrounded by open arcades that loomed three stories above them. “No,” said Tobie. “He didn’t tell me.”

“My son Paul was Sophie’s third husband.” He frowned. “Or was it the fourth?”

“The third,” said Jax.

“I don’t know how you keep them straight.”

“I remember the earlier ones better.”

With a soft chuckle, Leon spread his arms wide, indicating a grouping of chairs nestled in amongst potted palms and ferns. “Please. Sit. You’ve been traveling for hours. You must be hungry. I’ve asked my wife to fix us something.” The sound of soft footsteps brought his head around. “Ah. Here she is.”

A woman bearing a heavy tray emerged from an open doorway beneath the far arcade. Leon rushed to help her, murmuring something to her in Arabic as he took the heavy tray from her. She stood a good half a head taller than he, and was perhaps twenty years younger, with a plump face and green eyes and the discreet headscarf of a devout Muslim.

“Good evening,” she said in lightly accented English. “Welcome to our home.”

“My wife, Yasmina,” said Leon, his face breaking into a broad grin as he introduced them. “She is a professor of biol
ogy at Al-Quds University. Sixteen years ago this December, I heard a loud pounding on my door just after sunrise. When I peeked outside, there was this beautiful woman standing on my steps. She shook her fist under my nose and said, ‘My grandfather built this house. I was born in this house. By what right do you live here?’”

Yasmina Ginsburg’s eyes twinkled with silent laughter as husband and wife shared a private smile. “What chutzpah!” he said, setting the tray with its load of homus and bread and olives on the table before them. “I was hopelessly smitten.”

While they ate, they talked of Leon’s son, Paul, and the time Leon had spent in Washington. Then Leon drew a pipe from the cavernous folds of his cardigan and packed it with tobacco, his expression growing thoughtful. He said, “I may be old and feebleminded, James, but I’m not so far gone as to believe you came all the way here to visit this
alter kocker
just to talk about old times.”

“You’re far from feebleminded, and you know it. I’m here because I need information.”

Leon cast him a long, steady look, and kept tamping his tobacco. “You’re a spy. That’s what you people do—you collect information. What kind of information could an old man like me possibly give you?”

“I need to know about the Nazi biological weapons program at Dachau.”

“Ah.” Leon lit a match and held the flame to his pipe with an unsteady hand. “That’s a pretty tall order, James. The Nazis were working with everything from anthrax to smallpox, and God only knows what else.”

“Did you ever hear of a disease that kills Jews, but is harmless to gentiles?”

Leon went very still. When his match burned down to the tips of his fingers, he dropped it in a nearby ashtray. But it was still a moment before he spoke. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

He leaned back in his chair, one hand cupping the bowl of his pipe. “It was in 1944. The fall, I think. A truck brought in a group of Jews from southern France. They were already very ill when they arrived—some sort of acute respiratory disease. No one knew what. They were put in a barracks where something like half the men were Polish intellectuals, the rest French Jews. Some of the Poles came down with a mild case of the sniffles. But almost every one of the Jews in that barracks died.”

He sucked silently on his pipe for a moment. Jax and Tobie waited. He said, “You know, a lot of people think the Nazis only sent Jews to the concentration camps. But the truth is, they rounded up anyone and everyone they thought might be a danger to the State. About a third of us at Dachau were Jews. The rest were a combination of Catholic priests, gypsies, Germans who opposed the Nazis, Communists…” Leon shrugged. “Hitler had a lot of different enemies.

“We were all made to wear overalls with color-coded triangles. The Jews, of course, wore yellow badges. The Communists and other political prisoners had to wear red. Common criminals wore green triangles. Jehovah’s Witnesses were given purple triangles. The Gypsies wore black, while homosexuals had to wear pink.” He gave a soft huff. “All these years, and I still remember.”

His wife reached out to lay her hand over his, and after a moment, he continued. “There was a doctor at the camp, a man by the name of Martin Kline. After he heard what happened in that barracks, he decided to do an experiment. He selected fifty Jews and fifty gentiles, and had them deliberately infected with the virus.”

“It was a virus?”

Leon flattened his lips, his bushy white brows drawing together in a thoughtful frown. “That’s what we thought it was. No one had heard of retroviruses in those days. But looking back on it now, it’s hard to say.”

Jax said, “Where did the disease originally come from?”

“Who can say? Those were terrible times, with vast populations in motion under wretched conditions. The miracle is that it never spread outside the camp.”

Tobie leaned forward. “So what happened?”

“Many of the gentiles came down with what I guess you might describe as a cold: sniffles, sore throat—that sort of thing. All but one survived. But half the Jews died. The doctors in the camp took to calling it
die Klinge von Solomon.
”

“The Blade or Sword of Solomon,” whispered October.

Leon nodded. He drew on his pipe, two streams of smoke leaking out the corners of his mouth. “Kline was ecstatic. He’d been hoping for a higher death rate, but still…fifty percent was promising. So he tried it on another group of a hundred prisoners, half Jewish, half not. That time, two of the gentiles died, and about twenty of the Jews. That’s when Kline realized it made a difference where the Jews were from.”

Tobie shook her head, not understanding. “Why?”

Leon smiled. “Ever hear of the Khazars?”

“No.”

“They were a semi-nomadic people who ruled a huge empire across the Russian steppes and the Caucasus, all the way to the Crimea. During the eighth and ninth centuries, they converted to Judaism. A lot of scholars think that many European Jews—particularly those from Russia and Poland—came from the dispersal of the Khazars, rather than from the original Diaspora.”

“Is that true?”

Leon shrugged. “Truth and politics make uncomfortable bedfellows. Just to suggest such a thing is enough to send certain people into fits. But there are two professors here at Tel Aviv University who refuse to be silenced—one a historian, the other a linguist.”

Pushing up from his chair, Leon shuffled off, to return a moment later with a small stack of well-thumbed books he set on the table before Tobie. “Recent genetic testing of mitochondrial DNA has been very suggestive. But who knows? Future testing may show something else.”

“What do you think?”

Leon shrugged. “I think there has to be some reason why I’m alive today to tell you about all this.”

“You were one of those exposed?”

He lowered himself stiffly back into his chair. “Yes.”

“This Dr. Kline,” said Jax. “What happened to him at the end of the war?”

“It’s hard to say. The last days were so chaotic. Everyone was starving. Not just the people in the camps, but the villagers and the soldiers, too. There was a terrible outbreak of typhus in all the camps, but because of the Allied blockade, we had no medicine to treat it. As the Russian army advanced, the Germans started moving inmates from the eastern camps, sending them to Dachau. New trains were arriving every day, but their boxcars were full of dead or dying prisoners.”

“From the typhus?”

“Mainly, yes. It was horrible—like something from the Apocalypse.” He tightened his grip on the bowl of his pipe, his gaze lost in the distance. “At that point, there was no one left to bury them. The bodies just piled up. I still remember the day the American infantry liberated the camp. They took one look at those piles of emaciated corpses, and rounded up every German guard in the camp—about five hundred of them—and shot them.”

“The Dachau Massacre,” said Jax.

Leon nodded. “Some of those guards were sadistic
bulvons.
But most of them were just kids. Scared kids, drafted into the army and doing what they were told. The ones the
Americans should have shot—men like Martin Kline—are the ones who got away.”

Jax leaned forward. “You’ve no idea what happened to him?”

“I heard he fled east, to the Russians. But who knows?”

Jax met Tobie’s gaze, but said nothing.

Leon glanced from one to the other. “Why are you asking me about all this, James?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Leon.”

Leon let out a long sigh that shook his narrow chest. “It’s still out there, isn’t it? That pathogen…whatever it is. It’s still out there, and someone has it. Someone who’s planning to use it.”

When Jax didn’t answer, Leon raised one shaky hand to rub his eyes, and his voice broke. “God help us all.”

The call from Andrei came through about ten minutes later.
Excusing himself, Jax retreated to a small chamber on the far side of the courtyard.

The Russian came straight to the point. “Remember that boy you were interested in?”

“Stefan Baklanov?”

“That’s him.”

“You found him?”

“Not exactly. But we picked up someone who appears to have been looking for him. A Chechen by the name of Borz Zakaev.”

Jax glanced toward the courtyard, where October was drinking peppermint tea with Ginsburg’s Islamic wife. He said, “Has this guy told you anything?”

“Not yet. But we’re working on him. It shouldn’t take long.”

Jax knew what that meant. Once, the Russian use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” had helped brand the Communists as bad guys. But after the last few years, the West had kinda lost the high road on that subject.

He said, “Listen, Andrei: have you ever heard of a Nazi doctor named Kline? Martin Kline? There’s a good possibility he was picked up by the Russians at the end of the war.”

“Kline.” There was a pause. “Never heard of him. Why?”

Jax didn’t even hesitate; he needed the Russian’s cooperation, which meant that now was not the time to pussyfoot with the truth. “I’m beginning to think U-114’s hazardous cargo wasn’t exactly what we thought it was.”

Andrei’s voice sharpened. “This Kline…what was his specialty?”

“Biological warfare.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Jax.”

“Neither do I.”

Andrei said, “There’s an Aeroflot flight leaving Ben-Gurion Airport for Moscow at two
A.M.,
with connections on to Kaliningrad. Be on it.”

“What makes you think we can trust this guy?” asked October as their flight backed away from the terminal at Ben-Gurion. Around them, the lights of the airport lit up the night with a sulfurous glow.

Jax looked up from tightening his seat belt. “You mean Andrei? What makes you think I trust him?”

She made an incoherent noise deep in her throat. “Then why are we going to Russia?”

“Because Halloween is less than twenty-four hours away, and we’re running out of options.”

“You can’t seriously think the Russians are behind this?”

“The Russian government, no. Some other interests in Russia, very possibly.”

She was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand how anyone could do something like this. How could you deliberately unleash a plague you know is going to kill millions? Who could hate that much?”

“A lot of people hate that much. Look at what the Russians did to Kaliningrad. What the Turks did to Izmir. What Hitler did to the Jews.”

“But that all happened a long time ago.”

“Not that long ago. Remember Sabra and Shatila? There’s been a lot of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry whipped up in the last few years. Not just in the States, but in Europe and Russia and China, too. That kind of stuff turns ugly in a hurry.”

“But this disease won’t just kill Arab Muslims. It’ll kill Arab Christians, and Jews.”

“Another perennially favorite target. And as for the Arab Christians—” He pushed his carry-on bag further under the seat ahead of him. “Most people don’t even know they exist.” He paused. “I suppose it’s one way to solve the Middle East crises.”

“By wiping out everyone in the area? That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

“More extreme than nukes? Do you know how many good Christian Americans have been calling for the United States to nuke the entire Arab world?”

She stared across the runway to where a long row of planes was already lined up, waiting for takeoff.

Jax said, “From a practical standpoint, the problem with nuking the Arab world has always been contamination, right? No one wants to set off a bunch of atomic bombs in the midst of the richest oil fields in the world—oil fields everyone has been trying to get their hands on for years. But if you could get rid of the population…”

“Then you could just walk in and take over the oil fields, no problem. You think that’s what this is about?
Oil?”

“It’s a possibility,” said Jax. “The United States isn’t the only country that’d like to get its hands on the Middle East. Everyone’s going to be running out of oil eventually. Europe, China—”

“Russia.”

“Russia,” Jax agreed. “They might be a big exporter of oil now, but it won’t last forever. Think about it: of the five things we know for certain about these bad guys, at least three of them are clustered around Russia.”

She frowned. “Five things? We know five things?”

“At least. We know that whoever these bad guys are, they’re neither Jewish nor Arab.”

“Obviously. But that still leaves a hell of a lot of options open. What else?”

“We know that our bad guys command some serious resources in terms of money and personnel.”

“You mean, as in a government?”

“Once, I’d have said so. But there are some very rich crazies out there. And with the way everyone hires mercenaries these days, there are private ‘security companies’ all over the place. Not just in the U.S., but in places like Britain and South Africa and Russia, too.”

“That’s two,” said October, holding up her fingers. “But as links to Russia, they’re both pretty shaky.”

“I wasn’t counting those as the Russian links.” He held up his own fingers. “Three, the last time this Dr. Kline was seen, he was headed toward Russia. One of the questions we haven’t addressed in all this is, How did our bad guys find out the pathogen was on that U-boat?”

“You think Kline told them?”

“It seems like a pretty good possibility.” He held up another finger. “Four, out of all the salvage outfits operating around the Baltic Sea, our bad guys decided to hire the
Yalena,
a Russian ship. And five, our bad guys have people in Russia. They were there last Saturday, when they killed Baklanov and his crew. They were there when they killed Anna Baklanov. And they’re still there, looking for this kid—presumably because he can identify them.”

“Which is why we want the kid,” she said.

“Which is why we
need
that kid.”

October leaned back in her seat, her hands curling around the ends of the armrests as the plane hurtled down the runway toward takeoff. “We know something else,” she said.

He swung his head to look at her. “What’s that?”

“We know that if they find that boy before we do, they’ll kill him.”

“If we don’t figure out who’s doing this and stop them, tens of millions of people are going to die.”

“You say that like the boy doesn’t matter.”

Their gazes met, and Jax knew they were both remembering the same thing: a dark-headed, gangly boy with one arm thrown across the shoulders of a happy, panting mutt. “No,” said Jax softly. “The boy matters.”